May 22, 2011 Joplin, Missouri was hit by a tornado that traveled a mile across the middle of the town. The tornado killed a little over a hundred people, and left damage that remains today.
Brad and I drove our 1966 Ford Mustang, AKA “Jane Hathaway” to Joplin this past week to participate in the VCRA Race for Autism “Rex’s Rally”, a vintage car rally that is our tune up for the Great Race. We drove from Southern California to Albuquerque, New Mexico in one day. It was a fourteen hour journey, but we slugged our way through. We continued the following day with hopes of making the 10 hour drive to Oklahoma City. With perfect weather, good tunes in the car, and Jane doing her part, we arrived just in time for some good barbecue at Back Door Barbecue in OKC. Back Door BBQ does bbq brisket and smoked turkey like few others. We spent the night in Oklahoma and headed for Joplin first thing Wednesday morning.
We arrived in Joplin at lunch time, where many of our fellow competitors were registering for the race and going through tech inspections. We jumped in line behind them and settled in for three and a half days of rallying.
The rallying at this event is a little different from the Great Race because we end up at the same spot every night. The nice thing is you don’t have to repack your gear everyday. The other major difference is the amount of rallying you actually do. In the Great Race we typically have major transit sections because we are moving from town to town. In “Rex’s Rally” you are on the clock all day. Most transit sections are timed and you do hours of maneuvers (changing speeds, making turns, timed speed sections and turns with and without stops). Needless to say both driver and navigator are exhausted by the end of the day.
Our first day was a half day of rallying where we shook off the cobwebs, and tried to remember how we play this crazy game. We traveled around the farm country and parts of Joplin that were hardest hit by the tornado. We drove through a development that had been flattened by the tornado. There were only roads, no houses, street signs, or trees. The weeds were tall, but nothing else was in this little neighborhood. We seemed to still have decent memories of how to Rally, and finished the day relatively clean. We finished 6th out of 42 cars.
Then the fun began! The second day, we were the second car to start which is better then the first because you can sometimes see the car ahead and where they are turning. Also, if you have missed a turn or messed up your time you can hack off them, which means you catch up to them, hope they are running cleanly, and drop back one minute. Unfortunately, for us and the first car, they broke down about eight hundred yards past the start. We were on our own. We finished the first half of the day with no major errors and went to lunch in Branson at an automobile auction house. They had several beautiful cars in their showroom including a vintage Porsche, Jaguar, Mercedes, Thunderbird and Rolls Royce. All the cars were outwardly perfect. We enjoyed our lunch and headed back out on the course.
The course had us heading down a two lane highway for quite sometime, our directions told us we were to turn left on at a road marked “F”. We saw the road sign ahead and prepared for the turn. We continued a couple of miles and found the next direction. We did this again and again for about fifteen minutes until we saw a sign that said curve in road 25 miles per hour. Uh oh, this is bad we are going 45 mph and they would never have us speed like that. We have made a wrong turn! We quickly turn around, and sped back through every turn and slowed down only
when necessary. We returned back to the spot where we mis-turned, to find our friends in their blue 1966 Chevy Nova. Yikes, we were twenty minutes behind where we were supposed to be. We continued speeding around other cars and made up 3 minutes. We were doomed! Sure enough, we arrived at the check point 18 minutes late. We marked our time, a bad one, and started a new leg, now penalty free.
This is where you have to figure out where you are in the directions and continue on, fortunately we were still looking for “F” not a “P” (who knew P’s and F’s looked so much alike), so we knew the speed and what we were looking for. The previous leg was done and we needed to stay focused. We finished the day as well as we could. We are able to throw away two legs for the entire rally, and we knew which one of our two would be. We were pleased to achieve an “Ace” (perfect leg) on the last leg of the day. Knowing the 18 minute error would ultimately be thrown out we finished in the top 10 for the day
Saturday was a new day and we were going to stay on course. We started early that morning and drove through Oklahoma and parts of Kansas. It is beautiful this time of the year everything is lush and green with wild flowers blooming everywhere. We drove by multiple farms with Black Angus cows and their calves standing in the shade of the trees with cumulus clouds in the background. You would think you were staring at a picture. We couldn’t stare too long or we might miss something. We drove all day with a break in the middle. We visited a museum in Oklahoma that claims to be the world’s largest gun collection. It might be, we walked through and were amazed by all the guns, including movie guns and the first Chinese gun and a variety of other collectibles. The rallying was challenging and constant. We rallied from after lunch until almost 5pm. We knew we didn’t miss a thing, but there were so many directions we had no idea how we finished. We returned to find that we finished again in the top 10. We were thrilled.
The weather turned on Saturday night and it stormed into the early morning. We were leaving Jane with some friends in Missouri, and due to the weather, we all concluded it was best to call it a weekend, we packed up and headed out. We had achieved what we came for, to clear the cobwebs. Although we did not complete the last day, we achieved our goal of practicing and clearing out the cobwebs. We headed for Jefferson City
Jane is waiting in Jefferson City to be shipped to Buffalo, and we are looking forward to meeting her there in June.
More to come from Buffalo, NY to Halifax, NS!
MissHathawaysGreatRace 
What an adventure you two are having! I get my P’s and F’s mixed up all the time! Be safe! 😘
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