As we drove down to the Kensico Dam Plaza, we kept looking at the sky. "Think it’s going to rain?- No, it’s blowing away." Well, we were right- and wrong. As we registered the final cars. It started to sprinkle. By the driver’s meeting, it was raining pretty hard, and continued as we handed out the instruction sheets and sent the cars on their journey. The rain stopped while we were in AppleBee’s fortifying ourselves for the long night ahead. We heard from the rallyists that the rain stopped after about 45 minutes- just enough to make the roads extra slick, especially on the newly paved roads and those with leaves on them.

Happily, we didn’t lose any of our cars to incidents (at least none that we heard about!) However, one of our rallyists did stop to assist a girl who had gone off the road (Baptist Church Road, I believe), and they requested a time allowance for the time spent helping her get assistance. We did give them an allowance, and we thank them for being good Samaritans.

The route instructions were fairly simple. The majority of you proved us right on that count. However, the average speed was such that you really didn’t have a lot of opportunities to make up time. In retrospect, due to the bad conditions, we could have made the average speed a little lower, but when we were designing the rally, we didn’t want you having a problem driving too slowly on fast roads.

Some of you had difficulty with instruction #18. We tried to be helpful at the driver’s meeting by alerting you that the sign was not easily read. But, you had to stop at a stop sign, and the Narraggansett sign was directly ahead of you. No pity on that count!

There were 45 on-course Turkeys put up and 1 off-course (on Sherwood, if you made a right instead of a left). Strangely enough, there was a Turkey-napping. Someone relocated 4 of the Turkeys to a road not on the rally. Actually, one car did get one of these "lost" Turkeys on an off-course excursion, but we didn’t penalize them for an off-course Turkey, since we didn’t put it there.

We also had many of you tell us that you really enjoyed the route. We’re very glad when we hear that. You can imagine how much effort goes into planning and putting on a rally. We ran this route 6 times, including putting up the signs and taking them down on Sunday morning. We even did another partial run when we heard from a friend that there were "signs with bright orange turkeys and numbers on them on Quaker Bridge Road". That is how we found out about the "lost" Turkeys!

Fifty-four cars started the rally, 38 came through the checkpoint, 9 handed in their sheets at AppleBee’s, and 8 may still be out looking for Turkeys! One car, #48, was waved through the checkpoint by another rallyist, but we did get their time, and were able to identify them by their car (an Acura) and their heart-felt note on the back of their answer sheet. So, even though it was their first rally, (and we believe it was the navigator’s birthday as well), we hope they had a good time, and were happy with their initial results- and belated Happy Birthday!

We hope you had fun. If you have questions, would like to volunteer to help at a rally, want information on joining the Westchester Sports Car Club, give us a call at the number below. We’d love to hear from you! Don’t forget to check out our website as well for information about the club, events, for sale page, and other interesting things- www.wscc.org.

Rallymasters, Debbi and Gary Kanzler

914-762-6324