Christmas Lights Rally 2016

It's holiday time again! Who doesn't like to get out and enjoy the Christmas lights displays on houses and in gardens that people spend days, weeks and even months preparing?
We do, and so do other members of the Twin Cities Rally Club. Every year TCRC member Mark Larson puts on a Road Rally based around a tour around some of the best lights in the Twin Cities metro area. The rally has been a Christmas fixture for many years and is very popular and a good turn out is guaranteed, drawing members of the TCRC, both road rallyists and stage rally crews too as well as the general public.
The location for this years tour was the same as last year, South St. Paul and Inver Grove Heights. But with many, many lit houses in the area, we were not guaranteed to see the same lights again. Some of the major displays were kept on the route, but there were also new ones to see, and as one of the property owners, (or perhaps it really was Santa) told me that every year the day after Christmas he's in the stores looking for new elements to incorporate into the following years display. So even the same displays change over the years.
Lack of snow in Minnesota imparted a different feel to the event this year. It certainly made driving around easier but there was a definite atmosphere missing that only snow at Christmas can add.
As usual my wife did the driving and I navigated using the map given to us at check in. We then headed out touring the lights and answering questions on the displays we saw on a pre-prepared sheet.
Having just finished my first stage rally as a co-driver I have to say that it was often easier to do that than navigate the route of this event. At least in the frozen Minnesota forests I was only concentrating on one set of instructions, whereas here in addition to following the route, I was keeping an eye out for limousines and mini coaches as well as trying to answer the questions along the route. Questions like "How many lighted Poinsettia plants are there between 54th street and 59th street?"

"How many lights on the tree?" Just kidding, that wasn't one of the questions.

How many Santa's? Snowmen? Polar Bears?

Minions seemed to be very popular choices for displays this year.

Plotting this route must've been quite the task for organizer Mark as he managed to keep nearly all the displays on the right hand side of the car so people wouldn't have to worry about crossing roads in front of traffic to get a closer view of the displays to answer the questions.
This is not a serious rally at all, and much hilarity often ensues at the scoring after the event when peoples interpretation of what constitutes a star or a snowflake differs from the official results. The generals for the event state. " A snowflake is not a star and a star is not a snowflake" and  also stated "you are expected to know the difference between a camel and a donkey." With so many of the answers to the questions being down to personal perception sometimes there were elements of a trap rally involved
I said this last year and it's worth repeating again. That if your local rally club is looking for something different as a holiday celebration then you might want to look at an event something like this. We're already looking forward to next year.
With that I'll say a big thanks to Mark and crew for putting the event on and I'll leave you with a picture my favourite display on the course. Merry Christmas!

A Santa recreation of the famous Belgian Manneken Pis statue.