Sign Hunting
Apr
2008
Last Sunday we drove up to Olympia to participate in the 28th Annual Corvettes de Olympia. It would be our first gimmick rally. In recent rallies, we’d fallen for sign spelling traps. This promised to be a sign hunt and at best would help us focus on sign reading. The rally consisted of two sections and a final tie-breaking exercise. Each section allowed for 2-3 hours to complete which was more than enough time. There were no CASTs, no timekeeping or course following traps. The clocks and computers were stowed away. The course following instructions were easy to follow, but finding the signs were not. The instructions included references to street signs, totem poles, locomotive mailboxes, and obscure and odd signs. Spelling and punctuation counted for correctness in the answers. During the rally we turned around several times to look for missed signs. We arrived at turn only to discover that we had not filled in the answers leading up to the signs. It was a difficult to put aside time keeping and focus on the signs.
In the end, we had 3 wrong answers. With 1000 being the a perfect score, we tied for 21st place with a score of 985. 76 teams participated in the rally. It was very well organized. During the rally we covered some of the paved transit areas from NOBM 2006. In the end we drove home to Portland feeling like we’d improved our sign reading ability and had fun to boot.
The rally master promises a more difficult rally next year.
