Phase Two...Weekend Events...Rallies (continued)

On one of the most unusual rallies we ever went on, the directions were written in Chinese.  Zan and his brother, Dale, planned it.  Dale was a graphic artist and quite creative.  The characters were written from top to bottom.  There were eight or nine pages of them.

We were the last car to leave the starting line. Zan told us this was one we wouldn’t win.  No one should ever tell us that.  We were more determined than ever.  

We drove for about half a block and decided we needed to take time to translate the instructions.  We had been given a key for the symbols.  By the time we had translated the first page, we had the symbols memorized.  From there on the translation was really quick and easy.  

Bill recalculated the time, distance, and speed, and off we went.  The checkpoint was a phone booth.  We were to call a number and report in.  Shirley, Dale’s wife, answered with “Lin Ling’s Chinese Take Out.”  In my best imitation of an Oriental accent, I ordered chow mein and several other things.  There was dead silence on the other end of the line.  Then, “Uh, uh, uh.”  I said, “This is Raymonda.  Please have my order ready when we get to the finish line.”

We continued to complete the rally.  The finish line was in the alley behind Dale and Shirley’s house.  We were right on time.  Only about half of the 25 or 30 cars in the event finished without opening their “panic instructions.”  Everyone else was late, some very, very late.  Zan said when he saw us stop a half block from the start, he knew we would win.

Once, Bill and I were in charge of a rally.  We can’t remember much about it except how the route was determined.  Bill and his tax appraiser partner had a city map and marked the proposed route as they went about their daily official business.  Your tax dollars at work!!!

Sometimes a rally would use unusual words and we would have to figure them out before we could follow the directions.  One was, “turn right at ustabe Cobb’s.”  Well, Cobb’s was a department store that had closed and the translation was, “turn right at use to be Cobb’s.  Depending on where  you put the accent determined what it meant.  We read it as “u STA be.”  To this day, we still include that word in our vocabulary. 

For the next part of this narrative about our rally days (or should that be “rally daze”), we are going to jump ahead in time, place, and family size...20 years, Casper, Wyoming, and four kids.

We were returning from Denver in our motorhome on a Sunday at mid-day.  As we went through Douglas, Wyoming, we noticed a group of sports cars gathered in a parking lot.  We pulled off the freeway to see what was going on, only to discover they were setting up a rally.  We hurried on to Casper, loaded snacks and water into the Honda, got the circular slide rule, clipboard, and stopwatch, and all six of us jumped into the little car and away we went, back to Douglas.

I really can’t remember much about the rally, other than the kids having a great time.  They had never been on a rally before and thought it was a lark.  And to top it off, we won the trophy.  Bill and I still had the “rally magic touch.”