Old Story

Men are stupid. We are. We really are.

Back in the days when I was involved in rally racing I lived in Pacifica, CA. We had a race near Olympia, WA (actually a long ways west of Oly).

Got up, got dressed, and drove down to Palo Alto to meet my driver and pick up the race car.

And by pick up the race car, I mean get into a decommissioned ambulance that had been repurposed into a utility van, towing a trailer with the race car on it. The driver thought it was clever to call this his "shaggin' waggin'." This was in 2002. But I wanted to race, so I was willing to put up with it.

Oh, but you've only just begun to understand the awesomeness of this tow vehicle. It was built in the late 70s and surprisingly was extremely underpowered. But that's okay, it was more than made up for by the power "steering." Note that "steering" in that thing was really more of a "suggestion." You had to just kind of encourage the van in a general direction and hope you didn't hit anything.

Anyway, the driver brought a woman along. *sigh* There was no way this was going to end well. No 45 year old man should be that desperately horny.

Anyway. I got up at 2:00 AM and drove to Palo Alto. We tooled around in Palo Alto looking for the house where this woman was staying. Eventually found it and started driving north.

Things were slow, terrifying, and generally uneventful for the first half of the drive north. We got into the mountains in Oregon and hit some construction. Literally. Mr. Horny was driving the van and spending more time staring at his lady friend than the road. I noticed orange cones ahead. Orange cones slowly closing off our lane. I got curious as to how long it take before Mr. Horny noticed the cones. It took three cones before he clued in.

We got to the race HQ at about 9PM. Took the car for tech inspection, got our route book, and ate. We got to bed at 1:00 AM. At 6:00 AM we got up, went to breakfast, got the car prepped, and headed to the courses.

At about 7 that night we ate dinner, etc etc etc. Got to bed at midnight. Got up at 6:00 AM the next morning (Sunday) and started racing again. That night we went to the awards dinner, then immediately packed up and started driving back south (9:00 PM).

We took turns driving all through the night. Somewhere in the mountains in Oregon the trailer blew a tired and I dragged it for 50 miles before noticing (yes, the van was that crappy to drive - losing half of the tires on a trailer towing a car had no noticeable effect on the handling of the van).

Somewhere around 2:00 PM I got home and went to sleep.