I figured I'd take it easy for the day, not eating too much, researching the best choices of anti-nausea medications, you know: The sort of thing that'll help out rather than cause problems. I found out that Ginger is supposed to be a good 'stomach-settler' and based on the stories from previous overnight rallies, I might need that in spades.

The start of the rally was fine: We'd spent an extra day to equip Ken's car with a second pair of driving lights to even out the spread of light in front of the car. They're still aimed by hand, rather than measurement, but Ken declared them satisfactory, so we left them alone. Leaving Hope at 9:10pm, we motored our way to the first regularity - a nice short stage of only 8 km.

Hey, I thought. This ain't so bad. I'd pumped enough Gravol into my system over the course of the day to probably cause a list in any ship worthy of the name, so I must be able to handle this... After the quick start, we zipped up the Coquihalla Highway for almost 80 km. Then we started regularity two.

There hadn't been enough time on the transit or before starting the rally to do all the computations necessary to get us through the night, so I was trying not to feel overly pressured. I could catch up - it was only a few hundred kilometres of road and instruction after all. At the end of regularity two, my worries over getting timing right were starting to compete with good old fashioned motion sickness. The lack of any light sources but those inside or attached to the car is a terrible distraction when you're trying to do math! We reached the end of the 35 km second regularity with some relief on my part. Onward to stage three.

Oh, not good. Only 3 km into the stage I was struggling with the process of keeping track of mileage, time and relative place in the Universe. My head was starting to feel the effect of the lack of outside light sources, and my concentration was fading, to be replaced with nausea. I failed to advise Ken of a critical turn, and we lost almost a minute turning round. By the time we were back on track, I was really having a hard time with anything involving looking down at the rally instructions.

To say that the remainder of this third stage was ugly would be an understatement. Thanks to those who had advised "Bring large ZipLoc bags... Lots of them." I was able to avoid messing up Ken's car again, but I was shot as a navigator. We managed to transit to Princeton okay, but I couldn't look down without heaving the last dregs of stomach contents every time. We spent the full fuel stop trying to get me to settle enough to continue, but I just couldn't. I really was toasted and hung out to flap in the breeze.

Much to my upset, we had to withdraw. It took almost two hours of 'not looking down.. not looking down.. not looking down..' mantra on the trip home to settle me enough to deal with things like the abandoned paper and tools of the rally navigator, tossed around the cabin in the haste to contain the contents of my stomach. We got back to Vancouver at about 4:00 am, and I promptly collapsed into a desperately needed sleep. Obviously, I need stronger drugs!

More info: RallyBC's web site and the results from Heart of Darkness 2003