This was a very long (but successful) day. Since we had an early start today, I was out working on the car at 5AM. After removing the points, I cleaned and roughly reset them, lubed the cam and reinstalled them. The car started OK but the points needed to be set by using a dwell meter. After discovering that mine no longer worked, I finally was able to borrow one from one of the mechanics on the Jack Roush team. As I attempted to make the adjustment, the engine quit and would not restart. The mechanic quickly discovered a bare wire inside the distributor that was intermittently shorting out. Within minutes, we had it repaired, the engine running and the points adjusted. I roared out to where Dawn had picked up the days instructions, she jumped in and we left precisely on time. The car ran much better today.

After this wild start, we were hoping things would settle down. We had a very good speedometer calibration and we now think it is dialed in extremely well. The course today was very long, over 400 miles, and contained quite a few sections of very slow (10-20mph) sections over very rural pavement. Our lunch break was hosted by the very friendly, gracious community of Beckley, West Virginia. These fine folks turned out en masse to greet us. They even persuaded all the churches in town to have their worship services earlier today so the people could be at the square to greet us. Each car was assigned a host and ours was a very nice lady, Pat Perkins. She informed us that her Presbyterian Church even fed their congregation lunch so they would stay downtown.

After lunch, we worked our way on up to Charleston and had a pit stop on the grounds of the capital. Our afternoon rally began near Hurricane, WV. This area we know well because our son Darin lived there until recently. However, the area we rallied through was so remote that I am sure that even Darin has not seen it. The finish line and parc ferme was in Ashland, KY and the crowd was impressive. The photo taken from our hotel window was after most of the crowd had departed.

TODAY'S RESULTS: score of 42 seconds, good enough for 54 out of 88 overall today and 29 out of 59 in Sportsman Division. This is a significant improvement and we are moving in the right direction. Today's efforts included one leg of 3 seconds and one leg of 4 seconds. However, the other two legs were 15 and 20 seconds. Obviously we need to be more consistent.