Here is Formula One world champion Niki Lauda returning to the scene of his 1976 crash on the Nürburgring, where he was nearly consumed by flames. To watch the clip is to see one piece of history visit another.
While we were talking about a particularly famous Project Car Hell Stingray, we heard a tale of meeting another astronaut from DriventoInsanity, where the man wanted to see some of his own legacy.
John [Glenn] is a great guy, as a kid growing up wanting to be an astronaut he was one of my heros, I had toy space capsules and the works and even a GI Joe I called GI John. Fast forward to adulthood I got to meet the man, myth, legend, twice, both times getting to chat one-on-one with him, in one case for a half-an-hour talking about the Space Shuttle program in the wake of Columbia which had a mere two months before disintegrated in re-entry, politics of space, and what's his favor kettle potato chip.
One of the more humorous things we discussed was, at the time I was living in Syracuse, New York, which has a very long, four-lane arterial highway/parkway that winds its way from the west to the northeast side of the city. I asked him if he had ever ridden on, driven, or visited this rather large, I'm sure quite expensive, highway that half-circled Syracuse and bared his name. He said "what? I've a highway here named after me?" "Yeah." "Well I'll be, you know, there's so many around the US that bare my name I've lost track of them all." He then asked his security detail if he had enough time to go, myself included, and take a look, sadly the answer was no. He said he'd have to look it up later and thanked me for the info.
Overall he was very down-to-earth for an astronaut; nice, generous, funny, witty, and insanely smart about space flight, quite the character, the world needs more like him and many of the others who risked their lives exploring space, sadly now a different bygone larger-than-life era.