T-Bird Rally, Day 1, Feb 19, 2005

This is all from memory...

T-Bird ran the weekend after Valentine's from Merritt to Kelowna and back. We headed up to Merritt on the Friday night to check into our motel and catch a good night's sleep before day 1 of the rally. The ride up was uneventful for the most part...we saw a couple other rallyists on the way but that was about it.

When we arrived, we were quickly informed by the check-in dude that we got the last room and the heater was broken. "Not to worry," he said, "I stayed in that room for two weeks and it has a space heater that works." Great. The space heater was as big as a toaster but smaller than a toaster oven. Lucky for us, we had arranged to stay the following night on Ger's floor so we had our sleeping bags with us. After we got our stuff to the room, we headed over to the Team AMMP (Adrenaline Rally, M45, MBCU and Phoenix?) HQ in one of the nice suites and relaxed for bit. Doug lent us his portable impact wrench to put on the winter tires. The entire motel was filled with rallyists so we didn't feel to bad using it after 23:00.

The next morning we got our route instructions and headed out. Being car #47 has it's advantages...plenty of time for calcs before the first regularity. The first regularity got off to a rough start. A few minutes before our start time I decided a bathroom break now would be a good idea instead of squirming in the seat for half the regularity. I hopped down a snowy bank and picked a spot. I did a quick shoulder check and realized that I was in full view of the lineup of cars. To remedy this, I ducked under branch to move further away just as a tree jumped at me from the size and poked me in the head. "Just a scratch," I thought. Before I had finished #1, blood was dripping on the snow. I checked the wound and my hand was covered in blood when I brought it down. I zipped up quickly and ran back to the car. As I was running around the front of the car and pointing at my head, Stephen realized something was up. I kept running past his door and around to the hatch. Stephen had got out of the car and came back to help me get the first-aid kit. Lucky for me, there was a nurse in the car behind us. She hopped out to get me bandaged up and ready to go asap.

We had one white-knuckle moment on the first regularity while heading for a tree but the Blizzak's did their thing. Winter rallying is great! The rest of the day was tonnes of fun up to the last regularity: Big White. This regularity was on mostly on tarmac. Unfortunately, it was two-lane road with a double yellow line. Nobody knew that though since it was covered in brown snow and salt. We got stuck behind a salt truck shortly after the start of the regularity. We waited back for a while and the the salt truck pulled to the right as the road took a long left. We took this opportunity to pass it which resulted in the truck driver laying on the horn as we went by. We didn't find out until we got to Rally HQ in Kelowna that we were passing over a double-yellow line. Whoops. If we had known it was a double yellow, we would have stayed behind. The police were called and had our car number along with several other car numbers as well. The organizers smoothed things over and no one was punished. We hung out a rally HQ until the scores were posted and then headed over to Ger's spiffy townhouse to crash for the night. We weren't great guests but we really appreciated the free room. We crashed on the floor and got some nice warm sleep until day 2.