In the spirit of yesterday’s Gran Prix on Belle Isle, I endeavored to complete a few laps of my own this morning. It was a beautiful day – only 45 degrees when I left the house at 7:15 a.m. This is my kind of weather. I needed to take the car for a spin, and get some groceries, so the only way to do that and get my walk in is to head to Meijer. I did six laps around the perimeter of the store before grabbing a cart and starting my shopping; then I left my cart in one location and sprinted to each aisle to pick up my items and just kept re-visiting the cart. Factoring in lugging everything into the house, according to my trusty pedometer, I managed to rack up 1 1/2 miles this morning. Just call me a multi-tasking machine, though considerably less revved up than that of your average race car. I was looking at the photo gallery of pictures from both Gran Prix days this past weekend– the track at Belle Isle looks beautiful. Years ago, when Detroit hosted its first Gran Prix in the early 80s, they ran the race in the streets – they had Friday Free Prix Day and you could walk in downtown Detroit and mix and mingle with drivers (and their groupies and pit crew) as well as get up close and personal with their cars which were sitting right out where you could touch them. The photo ops were wonderful. Open-wheel racing conducted in the streets outside your office was very exciting! Round and round they went, brightly colored vehicles looking like different crayons from the Crayola box, as they passed the Ren Cen, or negotiated a hairpin turn at Cobo Hall and then sped along the River. The event had the Goodyear Blimp floating around and it seemed you could reach out and climb aboard. For weeks before the streets were blocked off and buses re-routed so that the heart of the downtown Detroit business district could be re-configured into a racetrack, complete with piles and piles of rubber tires for bumpers at each dangerous turn. The noise was near-deafening during Friday’s time trials; the high-pitched whining of the engines and tires as the Formula One drivers and later in the day, the mini F-1s, whizzed round and round the track, made it virtually impossible for business to be conducted so most office workers were given Friday afternoon off. Detroit was in its heyday then and I am sure a Gran Prix in our downtown venue rivaled any other exotic locale back in the day.