First of all, A great big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my navigator who gets to celebrate her big "4 - 0" on the Great Race. Some little bird notified the Great Race staff of this event so the announcement appeared in the daily Great Race newsletter and the race announcers made a point to tell the crowd about it at each stop today. At the Finish Line, "Motormouth", the Great Race announcer, got her out of the car to offer her his best wishes.

This day began very early as I was up at 5:30 servicing the car and looking for places that might have spark plug wires. The quest was successful as I located a nearby Carquest warehouse that had a set of pre-cut wires for the Chevy. It took me about 30 minutes to replace all the wires. We hurriedly cleaned up, packed up, picked up our instructions and began the speedometer calibration run. Performance of the car was better but not as good as I hoped and the speedometer problem continues. At the end of the calibration run, I took advantage of a short break to change out the coil. This made more improvement but the problem still is not completely resolved. We will probably need to replace the rest of the ignition parts in Denver before we hit the mountains.

In spite of these problems, the car performed well enough that we posted our best time yet, 16 seconds for the day. Today's course had many high speed runs of 50, 48, and 45 mph through the Iowa corn belt with an extraordinary number of turns and stop signs. This was also a day with many traffic problems as well as delays by trains. On our first leg, we were delayed by a train for three minutes and 40 seconds. The race rules permit a request for adjusting the score for delays of this nature so we took advantage of this and received an adjusted score of 9 seconds for this leg. Then my navigator really showed her mettle as she had to contend with multiple traffic delays and successfully made up most of the time losses so that the scores for the other three legs were 3,1, and 3 seconds. The score of 16 seconds was the 13th best for the day and has moved us up to 34th in the overall standings. It was a good birthday celebration for Dawn!

Our morning pit stop was at the Iowa 80 Truck Stop and the Trucking Hall of Fame in Walcott, Iowa. This fascinating museum has a large collection of antique trucks on display and is well worth a stop. We had lunch in Cedar Rapids and our afternoon pit stop was in Marshalltown, Iowa.