We have now just finished planning, producing and cleaning up our fourth Bunny Run Rally. Last year was a very difficult rally that rewarded experience, patience and persistence. This year would be more straightforward without intentional tricks or traps. Well almost… there were several dead-end tricks mostly in the first 15-20 miles. The entire rally from start-to-finish was 67 miles and only visited 2 states. We had 48 cars enter the event and 18 with official finishes and 4 more that crossed the finish line after we left. We stayed at the checkpoint for 1.5 hours after the last car should have finished, heading to Applebee's at about 11:45 PM.
Some interesting comments about tricks included those puzzled by the dead-end sign near Armand Road. There was an intersection before Armand where one leg of the intersection (straight) was a dead-end indicated by a road sign. The only alternative was to skip the dead end that didn't exist and make a right turn and continue to look for Armand. Another trap that one pair found was Left after "Lyons", Lyons was a dead-end right before the correct left turn. Lyons Road did not exist, since it was a dead-end, the sign however did. So the left turn onto Davis was correct. Others enjoyed the "and follow" on Vail Road which seemed to end in a T. Glance up and there was a tiny map drawn on a street sign posted on a tree that indicated that Vail did indeed make a left turn. Another twist was the strip of pictures handed out at the start. It paid off to have the pictures handy, since one or two of them came pretty close to the end of the previous instruction.
The roads consisted of lots of dirt roads, several very twisty paved roads and very few main roads. The event finished just east of Route 22 in North Salem about 8 miles from Applebee's. There were 49 Bunny signs on the rally, 2 of which were counted twice, for a total of 51 signs. We miscounted on the sign at Applebee's, several teams found all 51 signs (next year we will throw in a few harder ones.) The actual distance was 67 miles and the actual time should have been 2 hours 33 minutes 25 seconds. Car #4 arrived 3 seconds early and missed only one sign! Needless to say, they were very excited at the finish. There were three clumps of finishers, a couple of cars very close to their actual time, another group about 20 minutes late, and a third group about 40 minutes late. The Bonus Sign was found by many of the people that got to the border crossing from Connecticut back into New York, it was actually on the Connecticut side but we were very lenient with the scoring of that.
Special thanks go to Debbi and Gary for doing registration, Ed for showing up ready to be helpful and Frank for being ready to do anything that we didn't. We have three more rallies planned for this year, a daytime rally in the summer, the Halloween Rally on October 20th and the Turkey Tour on November 23rd. Keep an eye on our schedule at http://www.wscc.org. We would love to hear comments, feel free to drop me a note at jesse@vgallery.com. As always we can always use some help in producing these events. If you are interested in helping we would greatly appreciate any assistance. There is a lot that goes into the planning and preparation of an event like this and more help can only make it better. Thank you for joining us for the 2002 Bunny Run and we hope to see you soon…
Your rally masters, Jesse and Barbara.