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
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