Bunny Run RallyMaster Letter

First of all, thank you to all those who participated in the Bunny Run Rally. For those who finished, congratulations- both for your persistence and adaptability. For those who didn't finish, we hope you had some fun and will come back and give it another try.

There was one error that we must take responsibility for. The instruction with the Road Closed to make a left after "AHEAD" worked when we originally wrote the rally, but when the road was closed due to construction, we made the mistake of not going back far enough to make sure that there were no other signs with that word on it. Unfortunately, there were, and it caused people to turn too early. We did have quite a few teams who realized that you needed to go past the Road Closed area before executing the instruction. Bravo to those teams, and apologies to those who didn't and spent much time trying to figure it out. During the driver's meeting, we tried to give information about this area, but the instruction, as written, was wrong. We think everybody eventually got through this.

There were two other instructions that presented problems, although they were correct, if not confusing. The instruction #32 said "Right at T (Helper no thru traffic) " and you came to an intersection where we put the anti-bunny sign right below the road sign that said "NO THRU TRAFFIC". This was supposed to direct your attention to this road sign and give you the hint that because you couldn't go straight, this really was a T intersection. Unfortunately, if you didn't recognize this trick, the instructions worked for several instructions but not really if you were paying attention because you mileage was greater than 3 miles between this direction and #31. Some teams backtracked far enough and eventually got back on course, but several teams got too far off track, and didn't make the correction.

The second area of confusion that threw quite a few of you was the instruction #36 that told you to make the second left. The first left was indicated by a WHITE street sign (Gail CT). If you remember, in the driver's meeting, I specifically mentioned that street signs could be green or white, in an attempt to give you a hint to look for the white sign. Unfortunately, we lost quite a few teams when they missed this street sign (granted, it looked like a driveway, but unless it is indicated with a Dead End, No Thru Traffic or No Outlet, it was a valid sign.) Unfortunately the directions apparently worked all the way to #40/#41 before it got messed up and almost no one was able to back track far enough to direction #35 to correct it.

There were two teams who found almost every Bunny sign, and made it through to the second to the last instruction, and then didn't go through the final checkpoint. We're still trying to figure that out. When we went to pick up the signs the next day, we went in every direction at that instruction to try to see what these two teams did, but to no avail.

We congratulate those teams that did go through the final checkpoint. We had two or three " Novice teams ", who had never finished a rally before, who did quite well. Maybe they didn't overthink the instructions- but we're glad they made it to the end.

We really weren't trying to make this such a difficult rally. Sometimes, after you have pre-run a rally several times, you don't see the places where there could be confusion. One more reason to have more people cold running the rally with fresh eyes.

Anyway, we hope you will come back for the day rally on June 7th. It will be quite different- no signs to find, but there will be questions for you to answer along the route. Plus, many of you have asked for a day rally- so it will be a lovely ride where you can see the sights along the way.

See you in June!

Debbi Kanzler and Dave Trezza, RallyMasters