The start of the 2009 Sprint Cup race at the Brickyard. Races here were of a different order for this reporter in years past. (Photo: Getty Images)

INDIANAPOLIS - The horrors of air travel make a man want to sing the blues, but it's relaxing to look out the window of a plane and pick out little details of the land stretching as far as the eye can see.

The first time I visited Indianapolis Motor Speedway was in 1988. Back in those days, I didn't fly very often. In fact, my first Indianapolis 500 began with a long drive at the crack of dawn from Louisville, Ky., which was as close as I could get without paying more for a motel room than my budget would allow. I marveled at the flatness of southern Indiana from ground level then.

I always heard Kansas was flat, but years later, the flatness of Indiana impresses me more than the flatness of Kansas.

In 1988, the Indianapolis 500 was so big that, in order to purchase a ticket for the following year's race, it had to be postmarked the day after the one just completed. The first time I went, I sat in a seat provided me by others. I was so impressed that I wanted a ticket of my own. The next year, I watched from temporary bleachers on the inside of the second turn. The year after that I moved up, in the ticket-buying pecking order, to the third turn. Eventually, at about the time I could secure decent seats, NASCAR required that I be at this other race near Charlotte.

I miss those days, though. I miss sleeping in my car after watching something called the Little 500, a sprint-car race in Anderson, Ind. I miss stopping at a McDonalds and shaving in the bathroom, then making my way down to the Big 500 before the sun was up. I miss stopping on the way in Nashville and experiencing the free flow of suds and country music on Lower Broadway and Printer's Alley. I miss being short on cash and having to improvise.

It's a phenomenon of life, I think. As we get older and more successful, life gets so ... encumbered ... by mortgages and car payments and individual retirement accounts. Once I thought an IRA was the Irish Republican Army. Life somehow seemed happier when it was a challenge to keep the electricity on. It's amazing how many people, against all odds, remember hard times as happy times.

Prosperity hasn't cost me my sentimentality, though. Honest to gosh, as I looked down on the Hoosier landscape from a vantage of 33,000 feet, I found myself humming "Back Home Again in Indiana," which wasn't just sentimental. It was strange because Indiana isn't home.

I like Hoosiers, though. Just about everyone I know up here is a good fellow or a good old gal.

And I like Indianapolis. I like its minor-league baseball stadium, Victory Field, and the sentimental poetry of its laureate, James Whitcomb Riley, and the salt-of-the-earth sportswriters whom I seldom see more than once or twice a year.

Riley wrote in character and was a character:

I was brought up in the country off a family of five
Three brothers and a sister - I'm the only one alive
Fer they all died little babies; and 'twas one o' Mother's ways,
You know, to want a daughter; so she took a girl to raise.

The sweetest little thing she was, with rosy cheeks, and fat
We was little chunks o' shavers then about as high as that!
But some way we sort o' suited, like, and Mother she'd declare
She never laid her eyes on a more lovin' pair.

Some fans complain that NASCAR puts on a boring race at the Brickyard. This race, though, boasts a degree of difficulty that most others lack, and that counts for something.

Naturally, I liked the Brickyard 400 better when I watched from what was little more than a row of benches and tables hanging from the upper deck. Now the track doesn't even let us go there, and we're in this state-of-the-art press facility that looks more like Mission Control at Cape Canaveral than the old hideout at the edge of Gasoline Alley.

I still like Indy, but I loved it when I was poor and, comparatively speaking, the facilities were, too.