The 70th Turkey Tour is now complete. We had a big starting crowd, 27 cars started and 17 finished at the final checkpoint and 1 additional team handed the answer sheet in at Amore a few minutes after the rally masters arrived. Not a bad showing, but we are sorry that 9 cars didn’t get to the finish line. For those that didn’t make it (and those that did) I would strongly suggest going out and follow the directions in the day time, as there are two huge benefits. First, practicing following rally type instructions will help greatly in the next outing, it is a bit easier in the daylight and there is no pressure to finish on time or write down signs as you go. Second, the roads we traveled on are beautiful, with great houses, lake views and horse farms... truly some of the best roads in the county.
The route took us to the northeast corner of Westchester county, with a very short loop into southeastern Putnum county. We overlapped a few roads, some in the same direction and others in the opposite direction. One 3-way intersection we approached in all 3 directions at various points in the rally. We never touched Connecticut, but we did get yards away at one point. One section in a somewhat residential area had a difficult to see left turn that several teams missed… the mistake had them in circles looking to execute an instruction that didn’t seem to work. Most managed to get out and resume the route. One team managed to skip about 15 miles and resume the rally after seeing a couple of turkey signs and figuring out from the instructions where they might be… not sure how that worked, but it did. We posted 59 Turkey signs along the route, none off-course. Sunday morning we recovered 58 and no teams saw the missing one so it was gone before the rally started so we didn’t count it. The top 3 teams found all 58 of the posted turkey signs. The time posted at the end of the rally was off a bit… thanks to Pat S. for finding this issue. I had added a few instructions after a night run and inserting the rows in the spreadsheets messed up some calculations causing 3 deltas to be doubled. The actual time of the rally should have been 2 hours 47 minutes 37.5 seconds. Max distance between instructions was actually 2.7 miles and the total distance was 70.6 miles based on GPS navigation.
It was fun planning this rally and apparently the winners have a feel for how we write them as this is the 3rd time they have won the Turkey Tour in the last 4 years. Congratulations Jessica and Cassie Michelotti who, in spite of being blinded by their parents monster truck at the start, managed yet another Turkey Tour win. Big thanks to everyone that came out to run the rally! Getting a bigger crowd is what encourages us to write these rallies, hope that builds further next year. Also, thanks to Ken Frey for helping pick up the signs Sunday morning, Debbi and Gary for doing rally registration and my dear wife for not complaining too much when I agree to write this rally year after year. We had fun planning this one. As I said before the roads are truly amazing, go out on the route again… good practice and great roads!
If anyone would like to plan a rally, we would love to mentor you through the process. It isn’t hard and can be very rewarding to see the first group of cars come into the finish. Let us know.
Jesse and Barbara