Learning the truth about the Talladega Superspeedway

It took us way longer than I'd expected but we did find the track. You'd think that a HUGE oval, high-banked race track and surrounding grounds would have been easy to find, wouldn't you? Alas, it was not. Linda and I were passing near Talladega so we (more she than me) thought it would be good to swing by and see it, even from the gates. I'd seen it on Google Earth so I knew that it was north of town, didn't look far. Using the gps software we sometimes use on a pc in the car, I saw a large oval area northeast of town surrounded by roads but void of any crossing it; looked like a likely place for a racetrack to me. As we drove into twilight, the road quality got worse and worse as we got closer to our goal. Before we actually got there, Linda was having to drive more left and right than forward to avoid the huge craters in the gravel road; on either side were standing pools of water; this couldn't be right.

I conceded that my memory of the location of the track had to be wrong and we turned back to the business district to find a sign or directions. We stopped at a convenience store, got some vague but helpful directions that included the famous directional statement "You can't miss it." This new route sent us out northwest of town on highway 77. Ten miles later, we're in Lincoln, Alabama; we missed it.

We stopped again for directions. Again they were vague but they did sound plausible so we headed a mile or so back down 77, turned left and found we were on Speedway Boulevard; that sounds better. Sure enough, a few miles later, we saw the sign in the photo. It was too dark to really see anything else but we learned that Talladega Superspeedway is actually closer to Lincoln than Talladega. I s'pose Talladega has a better ring to it.