| Ah, the joys of rallying. Let's see: So far in our intrepid adventures
we have discovered that 1) Them guys with the fancy computers in their
cars do pretty good; and 2) We are not going to win events if yours truly
spends too much time expelling what little stomach contents I have. We
are
out to enjoy ourselves, and I think we have so far.
Despite the fact that I'm now sporting a voice with the force of slightly worn out cassette tape, and possibly the 'flu (thanks Owen, I suspect), we managed to keep the car relatively firmly on the road and pointed in the right direction. Even the extremely slippery section downhill on day 2, stage 2 was relatively controlled. I managed to get the math done for day one before getting rendered brutally carsick - it must be something to do with the second stage of these rallies. Either that or I'm allergic to Gravol. Anyway, my spell of sickness seemed to pass. Leaving me a bit shaken but still able to function. It seemed to me like we'd managed to hold our speeds and times quite well, but the checkpoints proved me more than ambitious in that respect. So, there we were heading for regularity three, when my stomach started acting up again. This time, I was more concerned because there really was nothing left to come out, and the previous rally had seemed to show that, once I'd got one 'upheaval' done with, I was fine for the rest of the rally. We made it almost all the way through - and of course, I'd relaxed - when *bloort!* - out came whatever was left in my stomach. Eeeww, gross! Yellow! Worse: I'd missed the barf bag almost completely since my hands and arms froze when I started to throw up (Jeez, ya gotta love this delightfully descriptive language). Okay, now I was going to be fine. After I changed shirts... and pants.... We ended the day in good form, but having accumulated 255 points in time penalties. I really thought we’d done better. Examination of the regularity details showed that, indeed, we’d managed to zero a few checkpoints, and been out by less than ten seconds on several others, but we’d still picked up a couple of big ‘OOPS’s on more than one regularity. Gee, I wonder why we did so badly on stage 2…? We did get some ‘credit’ back due to time that we spent waiting for two cars to clear themselves up after an off road mishap. Thanks Paul W! Day two had me resolved to NOT use Gravol, and this proved to be the correct choice. Despite a stomach that the occasional lurch, I was actually able to drink water and eat a granola bar during the event! I figure that’s worth some emphasis, anyway. Over the two days, two regularity sections were skipped as ‘too dangerous,’ and if they were worse that the “Eileen Lake” section, I agree. We lost 119 points on this stage alone, but Ken managed to not hit anything on the way down a virtually pure ice slope. The rest of the day went well for us. We racked up another 74 points over slippery, muddy sections, but the trip was marvellous. This rally thing does get you out into some of the more interesting parts of British Columbia’s interior, and is worth the drive even if you aren’t actually interested in the technical challenges of keeping score. More info: RallyBC's web site and
the results
from T-Bird 2003
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