A Beer run.

May 1st saw the running of the Escape to Wisconsin road rally. Starting at Point Douglas Park, just outside of Prescott, WI over the Mississippi in Minnesota, the route took in about 150 miles of Wisconsins finest driftless country roads before ending up at a nice little brewpub at Reads Landing back in Minnesota.

Fresh from our success at putting on the Nowthen Rally the previous week, we were looking forward to getting out and enjoying the roads.

This event saw the debut of TCRC member Louis Hardin as rally master, taking over the running of this event from Clarence Westberg. New blood brought a new start point and new roads for us to try.

The event was a control zone rally.  What's a Control Zone Rally? Well what happens in a control zone rally is that you are given a combination of Time, Speed, and/or Distance for a section of the rally and you have to use those factors to arrive at a control point on time.  It was something of a new format for us. Still, we thought we'd give it a go, it couldn't be any worse than doing a trap rally. I even downloaded an iPhone App specifically created for the purpose. The Control Zone App from MSYApps. The thing that appealed to me about this App was that the variables could be set by a nice clean slider display. See below.

The Slider display of the Control Zone App

 The main display is also nice and clean too. The displays are simple to read and are highlighted green if you are behind schedule, red if you are ahead. The route is traced on the map with a blue line as you proceed along the way. There's other features in there like recording splits, that I haven't used yet. We were just relying on it to get us to the end of the rally and hopefully post some low scores. We'll come to how it behaved in the rally later.

The Control Zone App main display

We arrived at Point Douglas Park nice and early to socialise but with a chill breeze blowing off the Mississippi chat was kept to a minimum.

A nice blue sky, but there was a chill breeze off the water.

The departure time came and off we went. At the first control we scored a 6! That was unheard of for us at this type of rally where scoring was to the hundredth of a minute, follow that with a 17 at the next control and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. The new App must be having an effect! Then the wheels came off the wagon a bit. But not entirely our fault as an error had crept into the NRI's. The exact form of the error was not clear, I think a CAST had been missed off the instructions which resulted in us turning up to a control zone start at least 3 minutes late. Confusion reigned in our car through the next two zones, and in the end I felt it was easier to take the max points at the controls rather than mess around trying to work out how late we were and take the appropriate allowance., maths has never been my strong point. We were supposed to be out to enjoy ourselves, not get stressed out. The instructions were the same for everyone and others were discussing the missing CAST at the first break point so we didn't feel so bad as we set out on the next leg.
It was then that I started to have "issues" with the App. It was very hot in the car and my fingers were getting very sweaty and greasy, and consequently so did my iPhone screen. This became a real problem using the sliders to set the mileage, when my fingers were dry it was quite easy to set the mileage using the slider to get close and then fine tune it with the + and - buttons. But with greasy fingers on a greasy screen all that went out the window, just pressing too hard or lifting your finger off the screen could result in a change of as much as 10 miles. This put us late a couple of times and we posted a few scores in the hundreds before I realized what had happened and tried to give the screen (and my fingers) a real good cleaning and drying before I used it again. This seemed to work when I remembered to do it and we went back to posting some low (for us) scores of 7, 12 and 25. Which meant we were finishing off on a high note.
A word about the roads. They are some of the finest road rally roads that you will encounter. Winding roads that climb up steep hills to get out of river valleys and then wind their way around an undulating landscape before plunging down another switchback into a valley not unlike the one you just left, at times you feel like you are diving through someones front yard the way things are set up. To be honest, it's tough to get too much of this scenery and with all the trees starting to get leaves it was just great to drive through. Some of these twisty windy roads found me going into some kind of Stage rally co-driver mode to alert Lorrie as to how sharp the upcoming curves could be, "Very sharp left", "Hairpin right" as I studied the GPS screen as well as reading the NRI's. It was quite natural to me, and Lorrie certainly appreciated the heads up on what was approaching.
Another thing that should be known about Wisconsin State highways is that the State Troopers have a propensity for hiding and catching people speeding and we were saddened when we watched the car on the minute in front of us get pulled over. Getting a ticket was a disqualification in the rally, and it can be quite easy to get ticketed in Wisconsin on a sunny weekend.
As we headed to the finish we were quite happy. It had been a very nice drive through some great countryside, overall we'd had a good time. That to us is the most important thing.

Finish point, Reads Landing Brewpub.

There was still one last surprise for us. We had netted enough high scores to finish last and win the coveted Dead Last But Finished (DLBF) award. Some people might be quite disappointed at finishing dead last. Maybe we would have been if we hadn't enjoyed ourselves. But overall we'd had a really good time, so it didn't matter. Besides it's a darned good beer.

Dead Guy Ale. Very tasty.

All in all it was a good rally. Congratulations and appreciations go out to Rallymaster Louis and his crew. We look forward to Escape to Wisconsin next year.