Day 12, Stage 11
Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Hotel: AmeriTel Inn
Weather: Ranged from light jacket this morning to 102 in Twin Falls this PM; no rain

This was another day of beautiful, western scenery as we explored the wide open ranges of northern Wyoming and southern Idaho. Our start position was number 70 so we got to sleep a little later today. We did our speedometer calibration on I-80 and this concluded at the world-famous Little America Truck Stop.

Our first leg then took us into Idaho and to our morning pit stop at the Oregon/California Trail Center in Montpelier. This is a beautiful, modern museum commemorating the western expansion through this area on this famous trail. We scored 8 seconds on this leg. Part of the display here includes oxen typical of those used in the past. There is also a sign encouraging visitors to "Park your oxen here and visit with us". I managed to catch Dawn with one of the teams (she's the one on the left).

Immediately after going back on the clock, we were routed into a grid area of gravel roads with no names. We had to maintain 20 mph through a maze of 8 turns in both directions. In order to avoid the time losses inherent in slow turns, we elected to do all the turns at 20. We threw our share of gravel as we drifted through all these turns, all the time being careful to avoid the other racers in the maze who were doing the same thing. The Chevy performed well! We then completed the rest of this leg with a relatively high speed run (35-50 mph) into our lunch stop in Pocatello, Idaho. We scored 12 seconds on this leg.

Pocatello was an excellent lunch stop and each car was assigned a sponsor who met us, took us to the necessary facilities and lunch as well as giving us a bit of the local lore. Our host was the Powers family. Dave is the President/Owner of the Powers Candy Company in Pocatello. Thanks, Dave, for a great stop!

Leg 4 began well, then DISASTER! At a stop sign, we were to leave to the right at 25 mph, then make an almost immediate left and go to 45 mph. The (normally) trusty navigator had a lapse and momentarily thought the second turn was to the right and by the time she recovered and yelled, "Turn there!", she was pointing behind us. We immediately stopped on the shoulder but a string of traffic delayed the U-turn until the race car one minute behind us had caught up. Dawn determined we had to make up 50 seconds. We did this OK, but then compounded our first error with a second mistake (when will we ever learn!) We determined that the car in front of us was nearly a minute and a half ahead and (since they were an Expert team) concluded that we must not have made up enough time. So-o-o-o, we made up another 30 seconds. We scored 25 seconds early. How did the "Experts" do? They scored 29 seconds early on this leg. We have to constantly remind ourselves to "Run our own race - pay no attention to the other competitors!"

So we had a bad day - 48 seconds. The good news is that this will be one of our four bad scores that we can discard. So we remain in 32nd position overall.

Our parc ferme tonight was in Twin Falls, Idaho and this was the best so far. There was a huge, very enthusiastic crowd. It is the home town of Jim Summers who is our race Chaplain this year as well as the alternate finish line announcer. That may have been a factor in the response.

Tomorrow our start position is number 5 and we have our earliest stage start, 6 AM. It will be a very short night.

The Parc Fermé in Twin Falls