Tuesday, JUNE 14, 2011

Today was our best day yet.  We can still do better, but we are making improvements every day.  Yesterday we were consistently late about 10 seconds per hour of actual driving.  Rather than change our driving style or our calibrations for corners and stops which is hard to do, we decided to set the speedometer calibration to reduce the late time to zero.  Well, we overdid it a little and we arrived consistently 4 seconds per hour EARLY!  So tomorrow we will adjust is back slightly and we should get better scores.

Today’s scores for 5 legs were 8, 14, 4, and 4 early and 9 late.  We missed a speed change on the last leg which caused us to arrive late.  We place 30th today which is better than 38th yesterday.  The scoring eliminates the worst 5 legs over the first 5 days.  So we have now eliminated all 4 of the DNF legs from the scoring and tomorrow we should be able to eliminate a 3 minute score where we had a breakdown.  This will move us up about 8 places in the standings.  Of course great scores on the last 3 days will be a big help also.  I would like to end up in the top half, even with all of our mechanical troubles on the first two days.

The car ran perfectly today.  The driver / navigator team did much better with only a couple of minor lapses at the end of the day.  We had lots and lots of speed changes, stop signs, and corners today which made it much more fun.  It also helped that we had a good nights sleep for the first time in several nights.

One of the interesting things about travelling this way is that we can get from Chattanooga to Bennington, VT without remembering where we have been, not knowing where we are, and not knowing where we are going.  I just asked Carolyn where we had lunch today and we cannot remember without looking it up on our instructions.  I remember the town square, the nice church where we had lunch, and the menu, but I can’t remember the town.

Tonight we are in Hershey, PA.  We had dinner and the wonderful Antique Automobile Club of America museum and are staying at a hotel next door.  The car required only some cleaning and the tightening on one license plate.

The goals for tomorrow are to further improve our scores, and try to get at least one ace before the end of the rally. 

Bill