May 20, 2005

Rally School Cache GBES ‘05 Rally: Man, are my nerves churning.

Night Starting Line GBES '05 Rally: That wind was pretty fierce!

Night Course Challenge 1 GBES '05 Rally: Our optimism was still riding high!

Night Route Cache 1 GBES '05 Rally: Okay, we're starting to figure this thing out!

Night Route Cache 2 GBES '05 Rally: It was dry on Friday night, but based on Saturday, something tells me that won't last for long.

Night Checkpoint Challenge 1 GBES '05 Rally: Like someone else said, 'Hey, we're not lost yet!'

Night Course Challenge 2 GBES '05 Rally: It's a lot tougher to tell which way to go without that arrow.

Night Route Cache 3 GBES '05 Rally: Just another brick by the road. Wasn't there a Pink Floyd song about that?

Night Route Cache 4 GBES '05 Rally: We really liked this part of the course: smooth with no vehicle poking rocks.

Night Route Cache 5 GBES '05 Rally: Did we really do 6 caches along this road? I lost track.

Night Route Cache 6 GBES '05 Rally: Hey! We went into another county? Where's the 'Y'all come back soon' sign?

Night Route Cache 7 GBES '05 Rally: At this point, my eyes were starting to get a little blurry.

Night Route Cache 8 GBES '05 Rally: Oh, sure, now you tell me that there's a tough place to navigate in the dark coming up.

Night Multi-Cache GBES '05 Rally: This was probably the best part of the night rally for us. The moon shining brightly on the lake bed gave a sort of a glowing light to the place that was magical. It's also one of the last places on the night course where we had a clear idea what we were supposed to be doing! Thanks for dragging us out here!

Night Checkpoint Challenge 2 GBES '05 Rally: I'm going to log this on the 20th, but frankly, it could have been past midnight. Madness! It's all madness.

Night Course Challenge 3 GBES '05 Rally: This is where things really started to get confusing. Are you sure the Navy wasn't jamming GPS signals tonight? Is that even possible?!?

Night Route Cache 9 GBES '05 Rally: I remember this one. We were so screwed up with the route that I just gave up and just followed the arrow to the nearest cache.

Night Route Cache 10 GBES '05 Rally: We were starting to think that things were back on track. WRONG. Well, we did find this cache.

Night Finish Line GBES '05 Rally: Everything between route cache 10 and the finish was a blur. I think we went down that steep section. At some point we came across some checkpoint or challenge volunteers. I couldn't tell you which one. In any case, we begged them to point us in the direction of a main road...to give us any help at all in fact. It was a husband / wife team. I think the wife was feeling sorry for us, but the husband was determined to follow contest rules: 'Sorry, no help', he said. And that was that. So, we waited. After a few minutes, another team came by, and we followed them...across that gosh darn levee. After bouncing around for what seemed like forever, it was over, and we limped to the finish.