Summary: Days -2, -1, and 0

Day -2: The six ay-yem alarm shattered our rest period. After staggering through the shower, we threw some stuff in the car – and the car wakes up much better than we had, starting instantly and barking its bark. We headed up the peninsula for Flatrock and the rally school.

Picturesque? Yah. We might get used to the scenery after a week, but at this point it’s stupefying. “Flat Rock” sounds like an unimaginative name for a town, ’til you see the slab of rock they’re talking about. Then you’re impressed they could put any words to it.

And these towns have been around a while… some places settled in the sixteenth century? Okay, I can see that. The accents are an oddments mix of Scots, Irish, West Country England, and I-don’t-know-what. Arr they nice? Shurr. Are they law-abidin’? Shurr, mostd’ time.

The rally school taught one key lesson: drive in the center of the road. The shoulders are worn away, rough and ragged, and tire hazards are everywhere. We went through two practice stages at low speeds. On the second, we missed two turns by misunderstanding the route book. Hopefully the turns will be clearer when all the taping and marking is done.

Day -1: Technical inspection, held in a hockey arena with its ice covered by heavy plastic tiles, took awhile. Even the relatively mild regulations controlling our equipment bear interpreting, and some negotiation and discussion with the inspectors. The Targa cars, many of which are heavily customized, drew the largest share of the inspectors’ attention, so we weren’t done ’til 4 p.m.

Then a slight surprise: for the benefit of publicity and event promotion, the organizers had set a ‘car show’ for the public running ’til 9 p.m.  Following that surprise, another: the cars were then to stay overnight in the arena. Hmm. Our hotel is 15km away. We negotiated an escape, based on the “normalness” of our station wagon, and drove ourselves and our teammates back to the Holiday Inn and bed. Our teammates’ car was too interesting to be paroled.

Day 0: Preview/Prologue stages. The four of us were early awake, out to the arena, through the breathalyzer line, and then… in a meeting. Something about safety. And another meeting. Something about speeding outside the stages. And almost another meeting, but instead a general rush for the exit. 40 cars, many barely street legal, trotting up the Torbay Road at the 50 k.p.h. limit toward the first stage start.

Four runs total today, two each of the two practice stages, which helpfully were the same we’d run at legal speeds two days before.  There were hundreds of spectators along the stages, in little cliques near their homes or in moderate crowds near corners that promised excitement.

We missed no turns today. And we were mostly in the center of the road.

There were some clock issues both on the organizers’ side and on ours, so we’re not positive we’re perfectly on pace – but no penalty points are given today, so ehhh.

Tomorrow, the seconds count.

Summary: Days -5, -4, -3

Day -5:  Airline travel can go so wrong. Parking the car at PDX, our carrier’s auto-texting system notified us our flight would be late. The buzz-buzz of similar texts arriving grew so familiar that, by the following morning, I no longer detected new ones. They were just part of the background.

Day -4: started off rocky with more flight delays, but smoothed out as soon as we landed in Portland, ME.  Our checked bags were already there since they fit on the last flight the previous night (we couldn’t get on that plane).  Then our car showed up promptly, with 3200 miles worth of bugs on front, and we peeled out for the ferry dock, 700+ miles away. We had two GPSs on the dash, one garden variety unit and one Special Commercial Vehicle Tracking and Dispatch System from Renee’s work. The two GPSs disagreed about whether we’d make the ferry at 23:45 that night. I was optimistic, ’til we were cresting some mountain pass in Nova Scotia and a wall of fog clamped visibility to nada. Can’t haul ashes if you can’t see.  But the wall was thin, and as the night came on, the traffic was thin, too. 300km of wet, dark, unknown roads to cover on a deadline.  How dreadful.  🙂

We made the ferry.   Not our original boat, of course – the airline snafus had put us six hours late for that – but there was another, smaller ship queued for the late sailing. A possible problem lurked with the change-of-schedule. These are long runs, 7hrs on the short route and 14hrs on the long, and vessels are serious seagoing stuff. You don’t “just show up” at the dock, you must have a “booking”. And we didn’t. What we had was a missed prior ferry booking, and hope.

Top marks to Marine Atlantic. They bent the language of the contract and let us aboard. We chomped on nachos and fell to sleep in the cabin they granted us.

Day -3: Off the boat and rolling, a mere 921km driving miles to St. Johns, following the main road all along the top of the island. No problem except exhaustion, but we swapped drivers often and got to the city by 5:25 p.m.

Note that Newfoundland has its own time zone, one that’s offset a half-an-hour from those in the U.S.   When it’s 8 a.m. in Portland, Oregon, it’s 11 a.m. in Portland, Maine, then noon in New Brunswick, and finally 12:30 p.m. in Newfoundland.

No moose sightings yet.