1. Set trip odometer to zero
2. [odometer]
3. S
4. “South S. C. 230”
5. L
6. [car and “JACKETS STADIUM”] (NOTE: may be easiest to pull off on right for photo)
7. L at T
8. R
9. “CARETTA” {off course clue: traffic light}
10. R
Above are the first 10 instructions for this year’s Masters Miata Club Road Rally/Photo Scavenger Hunt put on by David & Ellie Brock. Guess which one we screwed up on?
The event was titled the “I Feel Good” Rally because instead of last year’s rural roads we were going to be treated to a more urban route around the Godfather of Soul’s adopted home town of Augusta, Georgia and three of the nine photos needed were James Brown related.
Did you guess number one? You’d be wrong and frankly we’re insulted, it took us all the way until number four before we went off course. And that was totally my fault.
We both saw #4, the SC230 sign, my navigator wanted to turn left, but I was locked onto #6 and was sure we needed a photo in front of the new Augusta Greenjackets stadium. Obviously the rally organizers must have missed this particular sign and we were supposed to turn left after we saw the next SC230 sign. About a mile and a half later, there was another SC230 sign. While thinking that it was still too soon to turn, it dawned on the idiot driver, i.e. me, that the North Augusta High School nickname is the Yellow Jackets. Doh! That meant that first left was the correct turn, so I made a u-turn and headed back.
Now, having traveled 3 miles too many, we were back on track. For the photo required for #6, I of course, didn’t pay attention to the note (may be easiest to pull off on right for photo) and navigated our lowered Miata at a sharp angle, so as to not scrape, through a fairly deep drainage ditch to park on the left side of the road and right under the sign. I had to repeat the process to get back out and then pull a u-turn to get back going in the right direction. We then successfully navigated instructions seven and eight.
It fell apart again at #9 though when the navigator mis-interpreted the word CARETTA as an off-course marker, not the next instruction, so we took the wrong right turn. We then spent way too many miles driving around a random subdivision trying to make every intersection fit our mistaken interpretation of instruction #11. When we finally made it back to the road we turned off of, turned right to continue in what we hoped was the right way, and then took what we hoped was the correct right turn. It wasn’t. We then drove a loop of Marion Avenue 3 times, twice in one direction and once more in the opposite.
Crap. We were about to just pack it in, when Donna said, look up in your phone for instruction #19, St. Joseph Hospice and we can get back on track by taking #20’s right turn. This was a great idea until we found #19’s sign. It was at a crossroads and because we weren’t sure which direction we were supposed to be approaching the course marker from we had 4 different possible right hand turns to choose from. So we grabbed a lifeline. Because this was the Brock’s second rally for the Club and they were familiar with the caliber of minds involved, this year they included a few course correction GPS coordinates throughout the instructions.
We didn’t have to use any of the other 3 course correction clues, but we did have to Google one location to get back on track. In a subsequent foray off course, we used some local knowledge to get back to where we needed to be. We started as the second car and were the third car to finish. Although the five cars were started 3 minutes apart, we passed our other four competitors, coming or going, at least once and a couple cars more than once. At one point there were three of us together on Telfair Street waiting on the passing of a mile long freight train creeping along 6th Street.
The object of the rally was to take the nine required photos while covering the course in as close to the baseline mileage of 19.0 as possible. Only four of the five cars made it to the finish line. We ended up in second place. The winners, like us, had all the right photos, but they traveled one tenth of a mile fewer than Donna and I did. Before you go, “Awww, so close,” our total mileage was 31.0! A full 63% further than we should have had, meaning there were twelve extra miles of opportunity to shave a couple of tenths off our total…like the big one, ignoring instruction #4 or even the little right hand side of the road note in instruction #6 above.