june 3 2007 : st. paul, minnesota, usa
Check out the June issue of Latitude 38 for a funny article about our trip. We didn’t do any of the writing but they put together what we think is a pretty good story, even taking a few jabs at the armchair critics.

Today we went to one of those gigantic indoor waterparks that seem to have popped up all over the midwest in the past few years. This one was right down the street from the Mall of America so of course it calls itself the Waterpark of America. Really unique. Our niece and nephew are finally old enough that they enjoy the waterslides, which is a big step up from years past when all there was to do was to play in the ankle deep kiddie park area.

This park also had one of those surf simulator wave machines which turned out to be a little cooler than I would have expected, though they didn’t actually let you surf, only bodyboard. When it was my turn to go the guy asked me if I had ever ridden before. I said no, and then listened as he explained to me how to turn and where to hold the board. I’m no pro bodyboarder but it was kind of funny when I jumped in, rode the board on my knees, and did a couple of barrel rolls before riding out of the wave and handing the board back.

The best thing about the wave ride though were the wipe outs. The water comes shooting out of the bottom of the wave with a whole lot of force, and the second you fall off of the board you get shot right up the face of the wave to the platform above. About every third person lost their swimsuit, so the lifeguards stand there with towels ready to make a face saving throw to the unsuspecting naked rider lying on the ground with dozens of strangers staring at them. I’d imagine that is both the first and last wave ride for a lot of people.

Then there are the simply painful wipe outs that occur quite regularly. One favorite is the face plant. It starts with the hands slipping off the board. That is followed by the face hitting the wave. The power of the water then shoots the face underneath the rest of the body. The momentum of that carries the feet up and over the rest of the body until a complete face first somersault has been completed and the rider washes up at the top naked and sore. It really is good family fun. Fortunately my six-year-old nephew Curt and I were able to ride the wave and keep our shorts on.

june 6 2007 : portland, oregon, usa
We flew to Portland yesterday and even managed to score a couple of standby flights to get us in a few hours early. When we pulled up in the taxi my mom was outside sweeping the sidewalk and hadn’t been expecting us, so she of course started crying. Moms are so easy.

Twenty-four days until the start of the Great Race and we finally got behind the wheel of our car today. Frankly, the car is awesome. I hadn’t been in this car since I was a young teenager without even a drivers license, and Ali had never seen it before, so we had been pretty excited about it. The car really is amazing. It has never been rebuilt/rehabbed and is in incredible shape for a totally stock 42-year-old car.

We loved poking around the car and finding all the quirky things that cars this old have. Things like a heater controlled by a lever that lets heat from the engine compartment into the car, an antennae that pulls out by using a special key, windshield washer fluid operated by a foot pump, a leather strap to tie down the spare tire, an AM Blaupunkt radio, and seat belts that make you feel like you are in an airplane.

My uncle hadn’t driven the car too much in the last few years and knowing the scope of what we were planning on doing with the car he had the engine totally gone over. By the time it was done he said it was driving like it was new again. I took it for a slow spin around the block, getting the feel of the clutch and the four-speed transmission. Then Ali got behind the wheel, redlined the RPMs and dropped the hammer. I felt like a little old grandma for the way I had just driven her around.

june 8 2007 : seattle, washington, usa
We hopped in the car this morning and drove north out of Portland headed for Seattle about three hours away. It was the first time we’d had the car out on the highway and we were impressed with how well it drove. In fact, it felt smoother and smoother as we climbed through the four speeds. About two hours in we started to run in to trouble. We went over a small bump and the RPM’s suddenly dipped to zero and bounced back up. We also thought maybe we smelled something weird but couldn’t tell if it was just our imagination or not. We pulled over at the first exit and popped the trunk to have a look at the engine. My initial thought was that it was something simple like a loose alternator belt since our RPM issues with the boat had always related in some way to the alternator. The engine looked good though, so we continued on.

A bit farther down the road, just a couple of miles short of downtown Seattle she started acting up again. The RPMs would drop and then quickly pop back up. The car was running perfectly however and we decided to try and make it the last few miles to the VW shop we were headed to. But just a little farther up the highway the car died completely. We drifted off on to the shoulder just as smoke started to pour out of the hood. This puzzled us since we couldn’t really think of anything underneath the front hood that would cause smoke. I popped the hood and we jumped back as a cloud of white smoke poured out. A little closer look and we saw it was coming out of the battery. A nice cloud of battery gas spewing forth out of the Porsche on our first long drive of the summer. Hopefully not a harbinger of things to come.

The gas quickly subsided, and I pulled the spare tire out of the way to have a closer look at the battery. I really didn’t notice anything wrong and had no idea why the thing had exploded. After about two minutes a guy stopped and asked what the problem was. We told him what happened, and he got out to have a look. He immediately diagnosed the problem. The positive terminal was turned outwards slightly from the battery and was actually pressing up against the body of the car.  I don’t know what the term for that would be, but it wasn’t good. Fortunately, he said, a new battery should fix us right up. But before taking off we gave the car one good push in an attempt to get it pop started, with no luck. Ali stayed back with the car while I drove off with Goivanni. He lived right down the road and knew his way around. Within fifteen minutes we had a new battery and were back at the car. He had to run though so he dropped me off at the top of the exit and I found myself wandering down I-5 carrying a new 6 volt battery.

Back at the car we started unhooking the battery and before long had two more cars stopped alongside of us, one guy who owned a ’64 356, and another whose brother was in the 356 club locally. A few more minutes and I climbed in the car to turn it over. Success. In about 45 minutes we had broken down, assessed the problem, gotten a new battery, installed it, and driven off again. Not too bad, and we got to meet some nice people. Don’t know what kind of response we would have gotten if we’d been driving a Honda Civic, but it was pretty nice, nonetheless.

Just ten minutes farther down the road we made it to the shop that is restoring our bus to meet the crew and get our first peak at the next Bumfuzzlemobile. They had everything set up for our visit and started out by getting us behind the wheel of the bus that we had originally bought. Never having driven one of these things before this was quite the experience. It truly does give you the sensation of driving a bus, sitting right there at the front with nothing but a windshield between you and the rest of the traffic, and swinging a big flat steering wheel around in circles to make the turns. I felt like pulling over and yelling at the little blonde kid for throwing crayons at the back of my head.

After that we had the grand unveiling of our bus. They had painted just one body panel to give us a look at the color we had picked out. It’s a bit on the unconventional side and they were a little worried at first. Turns out everybody loves the color now though, including us. The rest of the bus was in primer, but we could see all the bodywork that had been done to get this thing back in shape again. She looks great. We discussed the interior and nailed down a lot of decisions that needed to be made.

That white double-door VW bus behind the Porsche is actually the bus we originally bought before talking over restoring a different bus with the owner of the shop.

june 12 2007 : clarkston, washington, usa
After a busy weekend in the Seattle area visiting family we drove back down to Portland for one more day at my mom’s house. We spent the day doing all sorts of fun things like planting flowers and power spraying the driveway. We had a great week out there, seeing family we haven’t seen in years, getting a look at the VW, and driving off in the Porsche.

This morning we took off early and for pretty much the first time in about three weeks we had a nice clear, sunny day. We left Portland and hopped on the interstate pointed east. I84 runs right along the Columbia River with mountains on each side, great views of Mt. Hood, and as far as driving on the interstate goes, it is really beautiful. The sky was clear and blue, and the crops were a hundred shades of green. Everywhere we looked we saw picture taking opportunities and we found ourselves pulling over continuously throughout the day to take pictures of the car. In the end we really took a ridiculous amount of car pictures. Sort of like first time parents with their newborn. Eventually we veered north off the interstate towards Walla Walla stopping off in a few towns along the way. We had lunner at a little diner where the waitress yelled the orders back to the cook, her mom, and insisted everybody have a slice of peach pie. Quaint.

Around four o’clock we were nearing Clarkston at the Washington/Idaho border and decided to make that our stop for the night. While driving through a nearby small town I spotted a do it yourself car wash and swung the car in. Ali just shook her head and asked me if this was going to be our new routine, take pictures of the car all day long, wash, and repeat.

june 14 2007 : helena, montana, usa
We had another really nice drive today. The weather wasn’t all that great, but the road through Idaho made up for it. Highway 12 runs from one side to the other right alongside rivers the entire way and buried at the bottom of the Clearwater Mountains. On a blue-sky day this drive would have rated a ten, as it was, we still never took the car much over 45 miles an hour because there was just too much scenery to take in to bother with driving. Besides, the only people on the road were the logging trucks and they just passed us going 70 around blind corners anyway.

We saw a bunch of deer and stopped to watch a coyote play in a grassy meadow for a while before driving up and over the Lolo Pass and dropping down to Montana on the other side. Montana scenery is pretty stunning as well, as long as you stay out of the cities here. Our first city was Missoula, which looked like every single suburb in America except it isn’t a suburb of anything. Truthfully though, the only ugly thing about Missoula was those hideous buildings that call themselves casinos. Most of them are converted fast food restaurants or gas stations that realized they could make more money with a few slot machines and some blinking sign out front advertising their BRAND NEW MACHINES! These businesses really class up a town. Almost as much as those firework warehouses all over the country.

A little down the road we crossed over the Continental Divide at McDonald Pass which wasn’t quite as exciting as I thought it might be. In fact I don’t think there was even a sign marking the occasion. When we got in to Helena the car started to act up a little bit, sputtering and just about killing whenever I let off the gas. It seems to me that it is just the idle, which I should be able to adjust in the morning. Other than that the car is running great.

june 15 2007 : gillette, wyoming, usa
Yesterday morning I puttered around with the engine for a little while, trying to adjust the idle but not seeming to make much difference. Eventually we just took off with the engine still sort of sputtering when I stepped on the gas, especially from a stop.

We cruised out of town and headed down the highway. We drove for quite a while before it started to dawn on me that we should have reached our turnoff by now. After pulling over and having a look at the map I realized we had missed our turn by a good thirty miles. The plan had been to take Hwy 12 all the way across Montana, South Dakota, and home to Minnesota, but after missing the turn we decided instead to head farther south to Wyoming and drive through Yellowstone. We made it down to West Yellowstone around two o’clock, which felt a little late in the afternoon to head in to the park, so we decided to call it a day and stay there. The car continued to sputter nearly all day long, but only at slow speeds.

This morning we woke up ridiculously early, determined to make the most of the day. We drove into Yellowstone and immediately came across a big herd of deer. Two minutes farther we stopped to watch a herd of buffalo. And besides all of the animals there were also the mountains rising all around us, and the rivers running every direction. The setting is incredibly beautiful.

I hadn’t been through the park since I was a kid and Ali had never been, so of course our next stop had to be Old Faithful. As advertised, she blew up at 8:56 a.m. Because of the amazing weather and blue skies it turned out to be a pretty neat little tourist attraction and natural phenomenon wrapped in one.

A little farther on down the road we spotted a bull elk munching on the grass just ten yards from the road, and then a coyote hunting in the bushes. As anybody who has ever driven through Yellowstone knows, it isn’t hard to spot wildlife. All you really need to do is look for the line of cars pulled over on the side of the road. The road through the park really is great and by the time we drove out of it we had crossed the Continental Divide another half dozen or so times.

The drive through Wyoming was really nice. We passed through the town of Emblem, population 10, but didn’t stop because by the time we realized we were there we were gone. The Wyoming State Troopers were out in force and did a good job of keeping us entertained. Two times we had cars pass us only to be pulled over for speeding within two minutes. Not sure why we find that so amusing, but we do.

june 16 2007: worthington, minnesota, usa
Ali and I made the long haul across South Dakota today. We’ve seen plenty of SD in the past so we didn’t make many stops. We did however take a break at Wall Drug for a slice of middle Americana. Only in South Dakota could a giant mish mash of knickknack stores, calling itself a Drug Store, be a tourist destination.

The car has been a great conversation starter. We haven’t stopped once without gathering a small crowd of people asking what it is or telling us about their “other” car. We did have a problem with the car today though. We had just stopped for gas and when I started it back up the generator/alternator light stayed lit. The manual basically says it is either the fan belt or the alternator. The fan belt was fine and wasn’t slipping so I had to assume there is something wrong with the alternator. I don’t have an amp meter with me so I couldn’t test to see if the alternator was putting out or not, but the light would have me believe not. Fortunately, about the only thing on this car drawing power from the battery is the starter, so we should get home before having to really worry about it. Though having a red light glaring at us all day was a little unnerving.

Only fourteen days until the race starts. That’s scary. We’re not even close to ready yet. Not to mention we’ve still got to drive all the way to North Carolina. But we’ll get there. Don’t forget to check out the race schedule to see if we’re passing near your home. It’d be great to see you all as we pass through.

june 19 2007 : st. paul, minnesota, usa
We made it home from Worthington. The next day we spent the entire day trying to get ourselves ready for the race, which we need to leave for at the end of the week. The main issues were the cars charging issue and the speedometer install. I really hadn’t expected the speedo install to be such an issue, but after chasing down leads all day I still hadn’t found anybody who thought they could do it. Originally I thought I’d be able to do it myself, and I probably could have with a little more time, but with the clock ticking I figured it’d be best just to have it done by somebody who knew what they were doing. Eventually we got put in contact with a shop right down the road from us who didn’t seem phased by our requests, even the timeline. So this morning we dropped off the car for some minor repairs, maintenance, and speedo install. We’re really going to run this right down to the wire.

june 24 2007 : kankakee, illinois, usa
Fortunately for us the guys at the auto shop took a look at our website and thought it was pretty cool, meaning they were willing to go a little out of their way to get us fixed up and on our way again. Within a couple of days we had the car back, running smooth again, and with the speedo installed too. The speedo actually fit right in the original speedo spot on the dash, which was nice since there was absolutely no dashboard space to mount it. Our generator ended up needing replacement and we had the valves adjusted too, all of which added up extremely quickly at $95 an hour. This thing could end up being as expensive to maintain as a boat.

While the car was in the shop we spent the week being domestic. We took our niece and nephew to farm camp every day and listened to lots of stories about their horses Frosty and Copper. We also ran around town picking up our “safety” list for the race. This included orange triangles, first aid kit, and tow straps. In addition, we had already stolen a fire extinguisher from my mom’s house, so we’ve asked her to avoid lighting fires in the house for the next couple of weeks.

We made our visit to the dentist just two years late for our six month checkup, but we had a good excuse. Once we had the car back, we went over to grandma’s house to show her. She liked the car and told us a few stories about her kids’ cars, including one about Ali’s dad buying her mom a little pink car right before he shipped out to Vietnam. A “little” pink Oldsmobile Toronado.

Then this weekend we zipped up to the cabin for a couple of days of doing nothing before taking off on a month of craziness. We washed the car, fished with the kids (we caught nothing), and cruised the lake on the boat. Driving around the lake we were just puttering along the edge at about 5 mph when Ali and I noticed that even at that ridiculously slow speed we were going faster than our average speed sailing around the world.

This morning we loaded up the car with our one duffel bag full of our life for the next month, and Ali fired up the engine. She was taking the first shift, which amounted to driving to the gas station for coffee. Her sister and kids were standing outside the garage as she fired up the engine and promptly forgot how to drive a manual, dropping the clutch without giving the car any gas and killing the engine. That move garnered us one more round of good lucks as we drove away.

At one point during the days drive I took a look at the engine and found one of the distributor plugs dangling alongside the distributor itself. That didn’t seem good, and for the rest of the day whenever I tried to start the engine it took a lot of cranking before it fired. I don’t know how all this stuff works but I think it’s a safe bet to assume these two things are related somehow.

When we finally rolled into Chicago we only had one thing on our mind, Lou Malnati’s pizza. To make the moment even better the Cubs were finishing a sweep of the Sox on t.v. We had planned to spend the night downtown but we made better time driving down than we thought we would, so after lunner we hopped back in the car, did a couple laps around downtown and hopped back on the highway to drive a bit farther down the road.

Meanwhile, the VW is coming along nicely. All the metal work is finished, and the bus is primed and ready for painting. The last little bit of metal work was to relocate the gas tank filler a few inches lower. It seemed like a pretty minor thing, but it should make a big difference since the filler had actually stuck out into the bed area a few inches, meaning it would have been sticking in our ribs every night. The engine is finalized and will be done in two weeks, the Rancho suspension is ordered, and a whole bunch of other stuff is on the way. Somehow, they tell us the bus is right on schedule for us to pick up as soon as we finish the race.

june 25 2007 : ashland, kentucky, usa
Long day on the road today. It’s really only about 450 miles, not much in a new car, but a pretty big distance in an old car. Everything was going well in the morning, the car started right up and drove well. But it seemed that every time we stopped, the car was harder and harder to start again. By the afternoon when we stopped it was taking 3-4 cranks of about 8 seconds each before it would fire up. Once it was running it seemed good though so we just continued on.

We drove one section of road east of Cincinnati along the Ohio River that was marked in the atlas as a scenic route. In actuality it was the worlds longest continuous train of trailer homes. They stretched alongside the river for one hundred miles without interruption. I’m pretty sure the river was on the other side of them, because all of the “RV parks” had names like Twains Landing, and Sawyers Hill, but I never actually caught a glimpse of it.

Somehow we had managed to drive across the country with nothing more than a couple of light sprinkles along the way. So of course today, with a storm looming on the horizon it should have come as no surprise that the passenger window wouldn’t crank up. Just before the rain hit we pulled into an empty car wash bay and I got to work removing the door panel to have a look. The problem was obvious right away.Without going into details, a bolt had broken in half. But the half with the nut on it was nowhere to be found. It remains a mystery. At the moment I haven’t come up with a good quickly solution, but I do have it functioning as long as it is cranked very carefully.

Five minutes later we had to laugh at ourselves for worrying about having an open window in the rain because when it did start pouring the car leaked like crazy. It would appear that the windshield needs to be reseated because there was a veritable river running through it. Two rivers actually.

Towards evening we pulled over to have a look at the map. When we started down the road again the car was acting terrible. I hit the gas and it sputtered and grabbed, choked and coughed, as we accelerated slowly up a hill and across a bridge. A big SUV roared up behind us during this, but despite having the gas on the floor we just couldn’t get going. Then all of a sudden the car backfired and sent a huge black cloud flying out behind us totally obliterating the SUV. We got a good laugh out of that one. Once the car got up to speed everything seemed okay again and we pressed on in search of a hotel. Then at a stoplight the car died on us. I tried a couple of times to start it but it wouldn’t fire up. I hopped out and pushed us off the side of the road while Ali steered. Once we were on the shoulder we tried to start it again and it immediately started up and even stopped the sputtering it had been doing right before that.

A little farther down the road we found a hotel in Ashland, Kentucky. It’s a pretty unappealing town to be honest, but we don’t have to live here, just sleep for the night. We did however have to sign a waiver when checking in to the hotel stating that we understood that the train tracks directly across the street are used continuously 24 hours a day and that hotel management could not make them be quiet.

I had a look at the engine when we got in and zeroed in on the distributor right away. What I found was that the cap that had been disconnected yesterday still wasn’t really pressed on all the way. The car fired right up after that, twice, so hopefully that’ll be the end of that. We’ll find out tomorrow.

june 26 2007 : concord, north carolina, usa
We had a pretty uneventful few hours of driving the interstates today to get us to Concord. 3000 miles from Portland and the car made it. While most of the cars running in the Great Race are older than ours I don’t think that too many of them showed up to the race under their own power. We’ve still got what I think is a distributor problem. We’ll order up the parts for that in the morning and hope that it doesn’t turn into a big ordeal, which it shouldn’t.

Today’s drive took us through the Blue Ridge Mountains which were beautiful despite the fact that we were blastingthrough on the interstate. Actually blasting would be exaggerating what we were doing, but it would be the perfect description for everybody else. We had one guy come flying up behind us actually flashing his lights at us despite the fact that we were behind a semi and were passing another very slow moving semi. The amazing part was that the guy was driving an aqua colored minivan with a cargo carrier on top and Pennsylvania plates. What possible reason could he have had for being in such a hurry? And I’d have to say that in general I would expect any man driving an aqua minivan to keep as low a profile as he could when around other people.

A couple of hours after checking in to our hotel I got to work fixing the window crank and putting the door back together. While I was outside a wicked storm suddenly popped up out of nowhere. It came on so fast that I couldn’t even get from one side of the car to the other before I was soaked. I could tell it was going to be bad so I fired up the car and raced it around the hotel and underneath the reception canopy. Funny thing was that I had parked in the neighboring hotels parking lot because it was the only way we could see the car from our hotel room. So I stood in the entryway of the hotel next door with my car under cover as the lightning struck and the hail fell. Unfortunately I learned a little later that there was some damage from the storm. Not to our car, but to the Taco Bell next door that had to shut down after losing power. Yes, a serious blow to our evening.

june 27 2007 : concord
This morning we got checked in with the Great Race staff, picked up our free gear, went through the technical inspection, and got the car loaded with decals. Now we look like a real race car.

I’ve also realized that most people don’t really know how this race works, so here is my extremely oversimplified explanation. It is a perfect time rally. Meaning that each morning we receive an extensive list of driving instructions for the day. Essentially the instructions will say something like from Point A to Point B drive at 30 mph. Make a right turn and drive 45 mph to Point C. The idea is to drive exactly those speeds over those distances. The real trick though is that their calculations for the perfect time don’t include the time it takes for you to stop the car and accelerate again. That’s where the math comes in to play. There are up to four hundred instructions per day, so it can get pretty confusing. But the leaders routinely show up at the end of the day with scores of maybe ten seconds off of the perfect time. Anyway, that’s the basic idea.

So after receiving our paperwork we decided to do the speedometer calibration run. That is a course that the organizers have laid out for us to drive along to figure out how far off our speedometers are. The run was along I-85 for about twenty miles. The problem was that the speed we were to run the course at was 50 mph. With a speed limit of 65 and most cars and trucks doing 75, 50 was feeling pretty unsafe, even at 11 a.m. But we kept cruising along and were doing really well for about fifteen minutes. With about five minutes left until we would reach the end point and have our time, which we could then use to figure out our error, we came up on a car actually traveling at 40 mph. There was a steady stream of trucks in the lane next to us, all traveling way too fast to cut off, and we had to slow down, effectively wasting the entire run. That was nerve wracking enough for one morning, so we decided that will have to be done either very late or very early in the morning to avoid the worst traffic.

Tonight we went to a minor league baseball game, but almost as soon as we got there the same sort of storm as the night before started to pop up. Lightning was cracking all around us and the sky was turning black, so after just one inning we made a run back to the hotel. Fortunately the tickets were free for the racers.

june 28 2007 : concord
Ali woke me up at four o’clock this morning just dying to go for a drive down the interstate. So I grabbed the stopwatch and a notebook and we climbed in the car for a four a.m. speedometer calibration session. Good times. Not surprisingly the semi truck convoy is still in full force at that time of morning and they didn’t cut us any slack. However we did manage to drive 20 miles at 50 mph without being run over. I was in charge of holding the flashlight on the dashboard while Ali did the hard work. The speedo was off by about 5 seconds, which is actually a pretty significant error for a race like this. We’ve adjusted it now and are really excited about heading out tomorrow morning at four o’clock again. Should be the last time though, and after that we’ll just wipe the floor with the rest of these racers.

We received the parts we had ordered for the engine and I dug around in there a bit, replacing the distributor cap and rotor, measuring points, cleaning contacts, etc. etc.. All a bunch of stuff that I’d known nothing about just two days ago, but had to figure out pretty quickly. By the end of it the car was running great again, so something I did must have worked.

After a couple of hours lounging poolside we made our way over to rally school, a meeting for all the racers to learn a bit about what the heck we are going to be doing for the next two weeks. We learned a few things about the rules and the festivities for the race in the different small towns along the way and overall we came away pretty excited about the whole thing. It really sounds like a lot of fun.

Then tonight we met up with a fellow Bum follower who’s got big plans for a circumnavigation of his own. This guy was only 24 and had already had a whole bunch of cool adventures of his own so we may have grilled him for stories of his trips more than we actually shared about our own. It was a good time.

june 29 2007 : concord
Ali let me sleep in until five o’clock this morning before dragging me out of bed and flopping me in the car for another speedo calibration run. Despite driving in the far right lane of a four lane highway at 5 in the morning, cars and trucks cut us no slack. We finished safely though, and got a pretty good time out of it. After making the necessary adjustment I think we’re all set for the race tomorrow.

We then drove around town looking for a suitably abandoned flat road to do a little more car timing preperation. We basically wanted to figure out how long it took us to drive from 50 mph, come to a stop, and accelerate back to 50 again. Then do that for 40 and 30. The problem was we couldn’t find a road to do it on anywhere. We drove all over the place for over an hour before finally settling on an only moderately busy road. It took some pretty good timing to perform our maneuvers without having another car come racing up from behind us, but we managed and finally got the numbers we needed. The rest of the Great Race Rookies are in some serious trouble, that’s for sure. In fact at this point we’re considering a sweep of the fourteen days of competition to be a reasonable goal. Yep, I wonder if they’re laying odds in Vegas for this race?

This afternoon we drove down the street to Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Ali asked me, “That’s not the Lowe’s like the store is it?” Seems she hasn’t quite figured out the concept of corporate sponsorship. When we pulled in all we had to do was sign our names to some sheet of paper and hop in line for our turn at the track.

We’d never been to one of these big race tracks before and couldn’t believe how big the place is and also just how huge those berm turns are. The pace car came around the track and we raced out behind him. Ali turned over the driving to me for this and might have been regretting the decision by about the middle of the first turn. It felt like we were about five stories up above the infield of the track as we accelerated through the turn. All I heard for the next five laps was, “Pat, Pat, be careful, Pat, be careful.” We took the car up to 70 mph and had a great time. There was even a ’68 VW bus taking the turns up high. He looked like he would tip at any moment but it actually handled it pretty well. We all ended up getting to go around twice for a total of ten laps which was pretty cool.

It was pretty funny afterwards listening to everybody talk about how fast they had gone. Despite having a pace car going 70, everybody was throwing out numbers that seemed to grow with every conversation. 75, 80, 85, even 95 were overheard.

A couple of other things it looks like I should clarify about the race. The cars are all 1969 or older and have to have original equipment, meaning a car like ours can’t have a powerful 1990’s Porsche engine under the hood. Also, there is no GPS allowed, no odometer, and not even a tachometer. We’ve got the speedometer, a stopwatch, and a clock. That’s about it, and that’s what adds to the whole challenge and the “vintage-ness” of it all.

june 30 2007 : spartanburg, south carolina, usa
I am actually giddy with excitement right now. I love to compete. It’s in my blood. And I like to compete and do well. Ali is the same way which is why we can’t play Monopoly or any sort of board game at all. We actually kept a running tally of our Rummy 500 games over four years on the boat. I’m down six games right now and I’m still not very happy about it. So with that said, here’s how day one of the Great Race went.

We started out the morning at eight o’clock in the hotel parking lot. From there we drove to downtown Concord, which is a pretty, historic town full of nicely restored old buildings and looking for all the world like it could be plopped right down in the middle of a 1950’s television show. They had the main street blocked off for us and there were tens of thousands of people lining the streets checking out the cars, eating gigantic turkey legs on a stick, and sweating. The heat was intense and we were dripping.

For about three hours we kept the cars parked down there, and during that time we met a ton of nice people. It was really cool to talk to people that had either had or have a 356, and each of them had a story. The governor threw us a big lunch and at 1 o’clock we finally fired up our engines and rolled out of town. As we left we drove through the crowd while the announcer told a little bit about each car and the drivers. The crowd was really amazing, totally crowding in on the road and making it just wide enough to drive through. I think Ali may have hit one or four kids, but hey, rubbin’s racin’.

Just out of Concord we had an hour-long speedo calibration run down the interstate yet again. A half an hour in we were only off by three tenths of a second and figured that was close enough so we zipped on up to the official start of the rally, which was just a tiny, relatively unused side road in the middle of nowhere. We’d all been given our official start times at the beginning of the day, and it was up to us to see ourselves off. The real start line was simply alongside a 45 mph sign on the side of the road.

Ali and I tried to time our start so that we’d hit the sign running at the prescribed 40 mph listed in our instructions right at the moment we were supposed to start. We of course mistimed that by four seconds and had officially started our first Great Race late. We quickly made up the time by employing the 10% rule. It’s sort of crazy, but apparently mathematically sound. We were supposed to be traveling 40, but we needed to make up 4 seconds that we were late. To do that all we had to do was increase our speed by 10% (making it 44) for 40 seconds (4 x 10). With that done we continued on and came out of our first stop sign to find a surprise checkpoint right off the bat.

After each checkpoint you essentially start back at zero and we continued on without any troubles to the second checkpoint. I say without troubles, but it was really nerve wracking. Especially for Ali, who was having a hell of a time trying to keep one eye on the speedometer and one on the road. More than a few times we drifted off the road into the grass before swerving back on to the tar, laughing, and of course, in true Ali fashion, saying “We’re going to die!” She’s been saying this for years now, yet here we are chugging along.

Then we came up on a corner that we really wanted to maintain our speed on even though we knew it was way too sharp a corner to do so. Ali tried valiantly and we screeched around the corner veering all the way across the road, again laughing and screaming as we did. By the time we recouped from that I realized we’d missed our turn. I yelled for her to stop and back up, which she did, roaring backwards down the road out of control. I had timed our screw up and knew we had just lost 16 seconds and had to make it up. Somehow the car behind us, which in theory should have been one minute behind us, had passed us in that time, so we had to fly past them on a windy road going way too fast in order to make up our time. By the time we did I really wasn’t sure where we were time-wise, but figured we must be okay. I had to assume the car that passed us was mega screwed up and we weren’t. Fortunately, that turned out to be the case.

The next couple of checkpoints came and went without any more issues, and we cruised into Spartanburg for the finish line. Again, there was a huge crowd lining the downtown streets to welcome us and we had a great time smiling and waving for the cameras like rock stars.

So eventually we got parked and got our scores. We had 27 seconds for the day, which I knew wasn’t a real good score, but wasn’t terrible either. For the four legs we were off by 1, 9, 14, and 3. The 14 was the leg we missed the turn on and somehow we had actually made up too much time by 14 seconds. We need to stay a bit more calm in those situations apparently.

As we passed the finish line the announcer for the race told everybody about how we had just finished sailing around the world. So by the time we had parked the car we had a group of people coming up and asking us about that, which was a lot of fun. No matter where you are in the world people have that dream to sail around the world and love to talk about it. We also met some great 356 owners who were super psyched to see us and were really pulling for us and eager to help us out in any way they could. Fortunately the car is running great and we don’t need a thing.

So while we were talking to everybody we missed the announcement that there had been a scoring error and that we should come back up to pick up our adjusted scores. Another racer asked us if we had gotten ours yet and we immediately raced back up there. Sure enough they had switched two numbers around and we had actually scored an Ace for the second leg, meaning we had a perfect time. That’s awesome for two reasons, one is that you get five bonus points in the overall scoring for the race, and two, you get a couple of cool Ace stickers to put on your car to show off with. That meant our score was only 18 seconds for the day.

An hour later they held the awards ceremony. We hadn’t talked to a lot of racers about their scores, but we figured we had done pretty well, at least as far as the rookie class went. The rookie class, by the way, is about 18 cars. When the awards presentation started we were holding our breath, and sure enough our names were called, second place! We got a check for $750 for that. Pretty sweet. 13 more race days like that and we’ll be all set. No problem, right?

Eight o’clock and we are now at the hotel for the night. We’ve got a 7:30 start in the morning for a race leg that is sure to be much more grueling than today’s. But man are we excited about it. This is some serious fun. We live for competition like this.

Day 1 leg scores: 0:01, 0:00, 0:14, 0:03 = 0:18 on the day
2nd Place Rookie, 31st Place Overall

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