Today was a very difficult day, with only one timed stage, but it was a Duesy! Rain, rain... rain.

I wanted to maybe buy a T-shirt or something for my kids, but Dad had already got a checkout time for the next timed segment (an 86.7 mile run to Arcadia) and was in a big rush to leave. Sorry kids!

Rain always make timed stages a lot more difficult and this time it was no exception! They checked us out at 10:00, which put our check-in at 11:55. Dad was driving (which I thought was a mistake, as I can see better and ...hopefully handle the car better should something go wrong... but he was ready to go before I was and didn't want to stop once we were rolling.)

The rain came in waves, but had obviously tapered off a bit from the deluge we heard while inside the hangar. However, the roads were filled with slow moving traffic and HUGE puddles, which made for slow driving. Looking forward on the route book and with a map I told Dad that he would have the second half of the route to make time, as the first half would probably lose time for us. Indeed it did, as traffic remained heavy while we left the Lakeland area. Of course to make matters worse we picked up, not one, but TWO "police escorts" in the form of County Sheriffs along the way for parts of the first half. Needless to say it is a real pain when some Sheriff tails you when it would be nice to exceed the speed limit by a few MPH for a while. (sigh)

Eventually the traffic lightened up, but the rain, in true "rally luck" fashion got worse... MUCH worse. The route was taking us trough some real back-roads.. in fact it was taking us through some active phosphate mining areas. These areas are criss-crossed with railroad tracks, bad roads, and worse signage. The downpour only made navigating this mess even worse. We missed a critical turn about 45 miles into the segment and ended up on a closed road, in the mud. Backtracking didn't make it better, in fact it made it worse. We ended up on yet another closed road in even WOSRE mud! Finally we found our way back and saw the turn we missed. Whatever time we had made when we lost Officer Friendly was now gone and lying in the mud somewhere. Any attempt to gain time by driving fast was blown by puddles big enough to have fish and/or whitecaps in them, and the occasional mining truck to pass in the poor visibility. The route book didn't give us any solace either as it showed we had 20+ miles to go and 10 miles of Road Construction and Detours ahead!

By some miracle we arrived at where the Route book said our first detour would be and instead found a beautiful new road surface, straight and true pointing South, with no puddles and light traffic. Yeah!!!

After I recovered from a few miles of Navigator's Doubt, I figured that this new bit of road was completed after the route book was, and we were the beneficiaries. We fly along and make good time, with me now calculating that we will indeed make it with time to spare. I keep doing the math between the route book and the odometer and we are making precious seconds with every mile. Even with the rain. What could go wrong now?

There is a medium length freight train on the tracks next to us and it appears to be just getting under way. Of course there is a railroad crossing ahead! I tell Dad to *go* before the train activates the crossing, but of course right as I say that the lights come on and the gates start coming down. We roll to a stop, and sure enough the train s l o w l y ... s l o w l y ... s l o w l y ... makes its way to the crossing.

After what seems like a millenium, it finally passes and the gates raise to allow our passage. The route book says there is another crossing in 4.8 miles, so I tell Dad to not let the train beat him there. Thankfully the train maintains its glacial pace and we cross the tracks again and it is nowhere in sight.

As we approach the checkpoint, with maybe a minute or so to spare, we console ourselves with the thought that this segment will likely winnow the closely packed (14 cars under 10 pts!) top of the field down to something more manageable.

We manage to zero the segment and head off to lunch in Fort Meyers. The rest of the segments today and tommorrow are transits... no more competitive stages until we get back to central and northern Florida. Traffic down here is too thick for that. The rally organizers have filled our days with cool stuff though, as you will soon see.

My Mom was flying down from New England to meet us in Fort Meyers. She had planned to spend time with us here at the rally but a death in her family the week before prevented that from happening. She still managed to get here for the big event tonight though, and had landed while we were on our 58 mile transit to lunch. Dad was on the phone with her doing navigational duties for both her and I, getting us to a Yacht Club. We arrived (after our share of wrong turns!) and Dad spent some time in the parking lot on the phone with Mom getting her oriented our way. After a bit he figured there was no more he could do over the phone and we headed toward the building to go inside. Sure enough as I am waiting at a crosswalk I look up to make eye contact with a car driver, in the hope that they'll let me cross, when I recognize my mother at the wheel! =)

We wait for her to park, exchange greetings, and head in for lunch.

I have a nice salad (the main course was crab, and I really don't like crab!) and I down a gallon of iced tea trying to cool down. The weather, while rainy, is oppressively humid and much hotter than I am used to.

After lunch we were supposed to tour some old houses that belonged to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, but we pass and head off to our hotel in Naples, 52 miles away. Mom follows in her rental car as we struggle through traffic on I-75. Yuck.

Our hotel is great, The Inn on Fifth in Naples. I pop open my laptop in my room and find myself on a free wireless ethernet network... whee! Unfortunately all sorts of work-related issues distract me from what I had intended to do: work on these pages. Email and Instant Messaging are nice, but I have to remind myself NOT to use them when I have "less important" things to do! =)

So instead of killing a couple of hours doing something useful like napping or editing HTML and photos, I ended up doing work. (sigh)

Here are the results to date:

To The Edmonds Collection.