June 20th was the shortest night of the year. The Summer Solstice. The Solstice rally is a looked forward to event in the Land O' Lakes region calendar.
Although this is only the second running of the event you know that it is something special when a post appeared on the Rallye FaceBook page the morning of the event stating "I'm so pumped about tonight I can't wait."
Team Holmes Rallye were looking forward to the event too. But we both had to put in a days work at the office before we could head out to the start in Baldwin, WI.
We arrived at the A&W shortly after 7pm to register and receive the instructions. The event was of two types. Conventional tulip instruction sections at the beginning and the end with map reading and plotting sections in the middle based upon the instructions for this years Tulpen Rallye (Tulip Rally) in the Netherlands. Even though we had two hours to plot the route on the map before the off I feel it wasn't enough, and perhaps that came back to bite us later.
We were so busy with plotting and socializing that the 9pm car zero time came along all to soon and ourselves and seven other cars headed out on the route.
Competitors and workers ready for the off.
What a great start we had! Scoring perfect zeros at two of the three timing controls even managing to adjust our time to allow for some time delays we had to take.
Then came the map reading sections. For those unfamiliar with the Tulenrallye GI's they can be found on the Tulip Rallye website. A quick Google for "TulpenRallye instructions" should find them easily enough. They are an excellent read, particularly if you are, or have designs on being a Rallymaster.
They include instructions to the effect of a road once travelled in one direction cannot be travelled in the opposite direction in that section of the Rallye. This makes you think, for if you need to get from route point 13 to 14 but the shortest route takes you along a road you've already used in the other direction then you then have to review all the roads around and find out which you can use. Sometimes it's not as easy as you'd think. Looking at the scorecard it looks like we went through a control or two in the wrong direction (I didn't think we did but no matter).
These map plotted sections took place at night, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. This made it all very hard work indeed. You can't use a map as it's meant to be used, to relate to your surroundings, so concentration on where you are on the route is of paramount importance, and at 2am after a hard day at work already, that commodity can be hard to keep up. Case in point, as we passed through the final manned route control on section 3 we both relaxed and momentarily forgot wether we had passed through route point 16 or 17 and even though we were only 2 miles from the section end we got lost and ended up doing an extra seven or eight miles to get to the section end. If the section had taken place in the daylight we may have been able to use the map to get a bead on some local landmarks to find out where we were. But it was totally dark out there, all I could do was point the car in the correct direction, courtesy of the information from the GPS and hope we got there in time. Which we didn't, a late penalty of 30 points putting paid to a low score. But we did make it to the section end.
For a few miles there in the dark roaming around lost, the atmosphere was a little fraught inside the Scion, but we got through it and after some miles of passing through points correctly things returned to normal inside the cabin.
Timings allowed for these map plotting sections turned out to be very lax and (aside from the section where we got lost) the competitors were always arriving early. This lead to some event timing adjustments being made as we progressed.
Section four from Ridgeland to Boyceville seemed inordinately long, as we seemed to loop around parts of Ridgeland several times before heading onwards. At one point we met fellow competitors coming the other way, the brief exchange between the cars was along the lines of.
Me: "Are you lost?"
Them: "Are you going the right way?"
Me: "We thought we were until we saw you coming at us"...
I was sure I was right so with that we headed on. A Mile or so later they passed us so we figured we were right.
Arriving in Menomonie at the end of section five meant the map plotted section of the Rallye was over and in order to get to the finish point in Baldwin we were faced with a rather long break here in order to reach the diner when it opened. A long break rather destroyed the flow of the event and we started to flag, with some of our fellow competitors napping in their cars. Like I've said in previous Rallye reports Menomonie is a town of many personal memories for us and I'm sure I've walked the streets of the town at 4am but that was over a quarter of a century ago, those days are long gone. But we always love a return to the town whatever the time of day.
Dawn approaches in Menominee, the final leg is about to start: As dawn broke, it was onwards from Menomonie to the finish at Baldwin. We passed through the first timing control on time. That was three out of four so far. No way we could complain about that level of performance. Then a short way down the road it happened. We hit a deer. To be more exact, the deer hit us. It came out of the blue and hit the side of the car by the front door pillar, destroying the wing mirror and cracking the windscreen. The deer then bounced off the roof of the car. A quick check of the car confirmed it was still driveable and we carried on.
However, that experience shook us up and put a damper on things and our concise communications and even paced driving went out of the window and we arrived at one control early and one late, we weren't even thinking clearly enough to take a time delay for hitting the deer.
However, the surprises weren't over yet. We arrived at Rays diner in Baldwin to find it closed down! However a quick 10 mile drive to Hudson, WI found a Perkins that was open who were happy to accommodate some 20 hungry road rallyists and workers, even though there was only one wait staff and cook on at that time. She even put us in a side room all by ourselves. Votes for using this Perkins as the finish point next year?
There are no prizes for this Rallye. Finishing is enough and all entrants receive the same "Survivor" T-Shirt. The lowest score was 4 points achieved by the father and son team of Tony and Nash Stamson. The low scoring novices were Matt Pfiefer and Ryan Hughes scoring 19.
The event is a lot of fun, the different methods used to traverse the route make you think. In particular I would like to try the map plotting method in the daylight so that you can actually use the map as a map should be used if you experience problems.
The usual vote of thanks goes out Rallymaster Clarence Westberg and crew of his wife Kate and Dave Fuss with his wife, Rachel. That so few people can put on such an event is a testament to their organizing skills.
In short, if you are a road rallyist in the Land O'Lakes region you really should be doing this event. Perhaps we'll see you next year?
Post script:
There is no doubt that staying up all night road rallying can take it out of you. The drive back from Hudson was tough even with some help from Starbucks. We arrived home about 9:15 am after leaving the house at 7:15 the previous morning, and went straight to bed. I got up shortly after mid-day. But this is akin to being jet lagged. I spent much of the day welded to the sofa in a zombie like state so my wife tells me. There was three World Cup matches on TV that I can't recall much of, so she must be right. However after a proper nights sleep things quickly returned to normality. A day in a zombie like state will not put us off competing next year.
