The Rally

The Rally this weekend was a complete success. The awesomeness was only outdone by the even more awesomeness of the whole thing.
I stayed at Ian's house Thursday night with Anne who was going to her breastfeeding conference in the morning. We packed up Ian's car and left at about 10ish to pick up Chris at his fiances house in Mississauga and then we were off. The drive to Wellsboro was uneventfull except for a 1/2 hour delay at the border to get Chris's green card stamped (he's Australian). We arrived about 5:30pm at headed off to our camp site just outside of town. The camp site was very basic (and cramped) but we just needed a place to sleep so it did the job. We got set up then when back to Wellsboro and had supper at Pizza hut.
We then went for a walk. Because the rally was going to start in the morning and there were 59 cars entered they were all over town. WE took some pics and looked inside the cars and compared setups etc..
It rained most of the night and all of Saturday morning. This made the rally very hard apparently because the roads are all primarily clay and gravely so it made things very slippery.
After looking at a few more cars Saturday morning we decided to head out the "Subaru Splash" morning spectator area, which was one of 3 to choose from. We were almost late getting there because we got some bad directions from a fellow Canadian. This sort of caused us to get a not so great spot for what turned out to be kind of a crappy spectator stage. The stage ended right in the middle of the splash so they really didn't have any reason to try and get through it to fast and the people looking after it were not doing a good job. It was alright to see the cars all steaming and stuff but it wasn't very exciting. Next year we will pick a different one for sure. Win some lose some I guess.
It did lower our expectations for the next spectator area we chose which turned out to be very VERY good.We got there quite early and so had to wait around for 5 hours or so but it was worth every second. Take a look at this clip i took with my camera. This is what we saw about 40 some cars do and then some 30 do at night, in the dark. Two cars in the night pass had mishaps in front of us. One just about hit the officials and other crew after missing the turn and sliding about 40 feet and the other tried too hard after the second turn and went up on the embankment. Both recovered okay.
We recorded most of the cars on a DV camcorder which I will have a DVD of soon. Lots of funny stuff on that as well so if you are over here some time I will show it too you.
We are already looking forward to the Rally of the Tall Pines in November as well as next years SPATTER.
I will hopfully have a gallery up some time soon, but I didn't get that many great pics, the video is just soo good it kind of makes the pictures pointless.