Fast-forward a full month (yes, a month!)
Today is June 21st, 2003. The first day of "summer" and I am at home. Why the quotes around "summer" you ask? Well, as a resident of the Pacific Northwest, I can tell you that the calendar may say it is Summer, but "summer" doesn't arrive around here for another few weeks. We really don't have four seasons here... we have two: wet and dry. Wet lasts most of the year, roughly mid-October through Mid-July. Dry is our reward for all that Wet, but hasn't arrived yet. It is a little past 7 am, and I am sitting in our kitchen at home. The thermometer says is 46 degrees F outside and I have a roaring fire going in the kitchen fireplace. It is "light" outside, having really never gotten very dark for very long. Today is truly the longest day of the year, when the sun rises at around 4-something am, and sets just before 10 pm. The twilight lasts seemingly forever with the northern horizon glowing from the sun's rays for a few hours after its sets and rises. A nice benefit of living at almost 49¼ N lat. All that sunlight still can't chase the clouds away though.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, my kids are gone, visiting cousins in Oregon. My wife is gone, visiting horses in British Columbia. That means I am home alone, with no yard work, or office work, or any real work to be done (though I am sure if Sue were here she would disagree with that statement!) So I figured I could sit here, feed the fire an occasional log, and catch up on telling our story of the 2003 New England 1000. Why the delay? Well when we finished the track day, I had *so* many pictures to edit, that I spent pretty much all Wednesday night working on them. I never caught up. Thursday came and went, Friday was my travel day back to the west coast (you will hear about the flight later) and then a return to work and family responsibilities... and never enough time to finish. I received quite a few emails from 'fans' of my web pages all over the world, as well as some other Rally participants, encouraging me to finish the job, but it really was the JOB that kept me away. Sorry.
So thank the miserable weather in upper left corner of the country for this final page. =)
Thursday. Rich Taylor always makes the last day the "final sort"... the sifter that separates men from boys, wheat from chaff. A broken fan belt rendered us into the "chaff" category a few days ago, as Dad and I really didn't care anymore... so we took our time and made a leisurely day of it. Nothing really counted anymore, so why try too hard. We did want to make a respectable show of it, so we did our best, but didn't do it with much intensity. For example: While virtually everyone was lined up and ready to go at 8:00 am, Dad and I were still up in the room, packing. Here is some proof:
So Dad and I packed up our bags, and carried the dismembered bits of Jaguar down to the parking garage and took up our position as last out of the gate for the final day of rallying.
The first stage was a long one: 114.1 miles from Mount Tremblant to the Musee Villeneuve (in the hometown of F1 world champions Gilles & Jacques Villeneuve, Berthierville, Quebec.)
I drove the leg, and of course Dad & I neglected to zero the odometer and had to stop about six miles down the road, do it, and adjust our math. Chaff!
The route covered some ground that we saw in the first leg yesterday, and Tuesday, including that wonderful twisty road along the hills from Saint-Donat to Saint-Damian... then down onto the plains along the St. Lawrence river. Lost of fun, but no pictures, sorry. I was having too much fun man-handling the Jag through the twisties!
The checkpoint was in the museum's little gravel parking lot, and we arrived when the lot was full of rally cars and milling rallists.
Chris Greendale had complained to me earlier in the week that there weren't enough pictures of his 1965 Aston Marton on the web site (folks back at his office were following the rally via my reports.) Maybe it was my past troubles with Aston Martin drivers that gave me some mental block, who knows? So I jumped in front of Chris & Ellen as they passed the checkpoint (hey, fair play considering the Astons that have jumped in front of us at checkpoints, right?) and grabbed some shots. Here you go Chris!
It is a pretty car.
I shot a few more cars passing the checkpoint, did a quick run through the museum, and got berated by Iain Tugwell for having such a late start time.
We zeroed the stage, and hurried off...
The next segment was a short 4.2 mile run to a ferry over the St. Lawrence river at Gare Fluviale de St. Ignace de Loyola. We were the last rally car onto the boat. The crossing was a chance for rallyists to perform some quick oil checks and such, and a chance for me to grab some photos... enjoy:
In the weird ways of ferries, we were one the first group to be unloaded, even though we were one of the last to load. Some confusing and stop-sign filled navigation through the town of Sorel-Tracy followed, as we took the next stage, a 25.5 mile transit to the Restaurant du Quai for lunch.
The route followed the Riviere Richelieu, which flows north out of Lake Champlain, up to the Saint Lawrence. We were travelling due south, just east of Montreal... got it?
Lunch was in a nice restaurant on a pier, with great views. The limited staff was overwhelmed by the massive influx of rallyists. The food was great, but the service a tad slow.
We left lunch in the middle of the pack. The result of the spotty service probably cost some rallyists good position for the upcoming TSD stages.
The next stage was a 24.2 mile transit to a pivot bridge over the river for the start of the next TSD segment. I didn't get too many shots as we did not see very many rally cars. I did get a nice one of Tim and Susan Matthews' 1970 Austin Mini Cooper Lamm Cabriolet though.
Stage 23. This one, had we been still leading may have been our undoing. We'll never really know... maybe if we had still been in the hunt for a first-place finish we would have done better, as it was we didn't really care and it showed.
This segment was 51.7 miles long but seemed about 300 miles. The route was an "L" shaped run down the river, over the north end of Lake Champlain and finished at the Canada-US border kind of in the middle of Nowhere. If we were smart, we would have cheated and cut the "L" with a diagonal run on larger roads. Why? Because as always Rich Taylor's Evil Twin always does this trick: making these late stages a little tougher buy boosting the average speed (this one was 41.35 mph), shortening the time, and putting it on a weekday afternoon. That means Rally Horrors... the school bus. We got hit by the quintuple whammy.
We got:
I managed to pass them all... in a 50 year old car!
But by then it was too late, we had lost so much time that we knew, a full 10 or 15 miles prior to the checkpoint that we could not make it in time. We did what we could to make time, but both traffic and Newtonian laws are hard to break at level we needed to cover the distance. We arrived at the checkpoint, flying through 105 seconds late. Damn.
The US Customs guys were nothing like their pleasant Canadian counterparts, but thankfully waved us through with minimal hassle.
The next segment, the final one of the rally, was a 110.3 mile run down to Basin Harbor. Dad had the honors of driving, and I made a mess of navigating. The course book had an error right off the bat and we made a wrong turn. It took me about 10 minutes to realize this... much to Dad's chagrin. Thankfully I had a map and realized that our present course would intersect with the rally route about 15 miles down the road. We did intersect, but due to the scale of the map, and the confusing nature of Vermont's rural roads, we ended up driving the wrong direction! Thankfully a couple of rally cars going the other direction gave me the clue I needed to navigate properly! Sorry Dad.
Once that hurdle was covered, the driving was pretty easy. I managed to get some photography done while we followed Jonathan Groat and Ron Ommen in their 1959 Alfa Giulietta Sprint.
About 2/3rds of the way through the segment, Dad relinquished the driving to me. He was tired and getting uncomfortable. We passed the green Jag E-type FHC on the side of the road in the town of Bristol... it appeared quite dead, but the two guys driving it, Bruce Miller and Elder Duque were nowhere to be seen.
We arrived at Basin Harbor with time to spare. We had enough time to go check into the hotel prior to running back to zero the final checkpoint.
We had a cabin right next to the one we stayed in earlier in the week at the start of the rally.
All that followed was some work. Washing the Jag, getting the tow rig out of the soggy ground it was stuck in, and putting the Jag into the trailer.
The next day I sent Dad off with the tow rig. He was driving south to pick up my mom and drive back to Texas. I enjoyed a very pleasant ride to the airport in Burlington with Rush Workman and Russell Glace.
I changed planes in Newark for the long flight home. I had specifically picked a particular seat. It was a 737-800 and there is a "missing" seat next to the emergency exit and I picked the seat behind it. This would allow me the room to use my PowerBook during the long flight as nobody would be in front of me. I upgraded to a TiBook from my trusty old 2400c over a year ago, and the big Titanium just doesn't work in coach. I picked this seat because:
I was ready. The flight was fully booked and this one time my strategy of being the last guy on the plane backfired on me.
As I worked my way down the aisle I noted that somebody was in my seat! As I approached I mentioned to the woman that it was my seat. She started whining about wanting to sit next to her boyfriend... blah blah blah. "you can have my seat" she said, pointing to the MIDDLE seat behind her. I'm sure the look on my face confirmed my feelings "fsck no! I *want* that seat. But before I could argue the lady in the window seat behind her volunteered the window seat.
Crap. Here I was, essentially becoming the delay in our scheduled departure, and the whole plane load of passengers are looking at me with that "just sit down a-hole" look on their faces. I was about to start pressing when I realized that it was futile, and just took the offered second-rate seat. When we reached cruising altitude I pulled out the laptop and made an attempt at using it, but there just wasn't the maneuvering room to do it. Of course the whiny lady chose that moment to *recline her seat!* I locked my arms up against it and prevented it from budging. She spun around and I said "I specifically chose that seat so I could work, and if you are going to take it from me you can sit up straight all the way to Seattle." She pouted, but stayed upright while I felt a little better about the situation, but still didn't have the room to get the web site finished like I planned to.
It is done now.... and I'd like to say that I had a great time, I hope you did too. Big thanks to Dad for bringing me along for the drive!
See you next time!
OK, take me to Goolsbee.org homepage!