Two More Misfits - BA2BE Rally Team

The Wakemen brothers BABE Rally team

Jim and Jeff are off on an adventure, the BABE Rally. The rally pits teams from all over the country in a contest in cars that cost no more than $250. The course will run from Staten Island in New York City to the French Quarter in New Orleans.

Our wonderful car is a 1986 Saab 900S, we have named "The Saab Story".

We had a wonderful time on the rally and could not have had a better finish. The only mechanical issue that we had to deal with over the entire trip was the exhaust system was not help up hell enough and would droop then drag. Eventually Jeff fixed it with a strap and it held up fine for the rest of the trip.

Day Zero - Wednesday May 23, 2007

After leaving work at my regular time, I went to meet Jim Thwaite at his house. Jim is the captain of our team from last year and our sister team this year. The Misfit Toys Racing team ran a '73 VW bug in this years rally. Jim and I headed up to the night zero hotel where we met Jeff and Chris. Chris is from last years team and was running with Jim in the VW. Rafael could not make it until the morning. Raf had to move over to our team since the bug only has two seats.

The ride in the VW was uncomfortable at best. It was small and loud and cramped. It seemed to bounce and float over the bumps, but ran well enough to get us to the starting line. After we got in and checked in, we strolled around the lot looking over the cars and meeting the competitors. Once we had our registration complete, we applied the vinyl decals to the Saab. It was windy and several of them folded over upon themselves before getting to the car. The passenger side door was the worst, and it looked fairly bad. The others really finished off the look of the car.

Day One - Thursday May 24, 2007

Today we had two challenges. The first was to buy as many different items a the Statten Island K-Mart as we could (including tax) with the supplied $1 bill. We did it wrong and bought 9 candy bars for just under one dollar. That gave us one item. We left for the second challenge thinking we had nine, so we were feeling good. The second challenge was to find some carefully cropped photos along the route. There were 16 photos that we had to find and we managed to get 12 of them found and photographed. Two had to be taken out the back of the car, and we missed those. One we couldn't find and the last one we had wrong. We looked at them and saw that several of then were further north on the turnpike than we started, so we worked out way back north and started over. I'd hate to see the ez-pass logs for this trip. Then we missed two of them, so we had to back track again. Since we wanted to stop to pick up an atlas for the trip from my house, we stopped in and had lunch at home. Then we took our last shot down the turnpike and south through Delaware and Maryland. We hit rush hour at D.C. so we were way jammed up. Once through D.C. it was fairly smooth sailing out to Harrisonburg, VA. We got in in time to get our points scored and join the party before it got too late.

Day Two - Friday May 25, 2007

Elvis Day - today we had to assemble dressed in our Elvis costumes and drive off to Asheville, NC. The days challenge was too get 10 photos with groups of three or more people not affiliated with the rally to pose for a picture with the team as Evlises. Full points were awarded if the picture contained ten or more other people. We worked really hard and the gold Elvis suit really helped out. You would be surprised at how many people are still die hard Elvis fans.

The nice folks at this Cracker Barrel even picked up our dinner tab. What a great thanks from them. My brother picked up a bunch of business cards and he is sending out the photos we promised.

Also we all got to sit in Woodrow Wilson's presidential limousine and get our photo taken. The director of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum was fantastic and really made our day (note to self: I need to get his name up here).

Thanks to everyone who helped us out by posing for our pictures, you were all great.

Day Three - Saturday May 26, 2007

This was the hardest day to drive, we had to traverse the mountain border between NC and TN no fewer than three times on three different roads. This was the only day to have a set route laid out in our instructions. As we were leaving for the day, we saw that the Sisters of FoMoCo had some fuzzy dice. Usually that would be no big deal, we had some really clashing purple ones in F1. However the guys are some hardcore geeks, their dice are twenty sided dice. For those of you who have only ever seen dice with the regular six sides, the twenty sided variety do exist and are typically used in role playing games like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

The first part of the trip was an easy highway and we formed a nice convoy. Then the instructions put us onto this interesting dirt road that we followed up and over the mountains into TN. The road was windy and had us baffled for a while, but the GPS units and maps indicated that it might go through so we took it and the "warm up" road was nearly as tough as the hard roads to come. Later that night Justin denied that he knew the road was unpaved, but somehow I think he was being willfully ignorant. Once we got to the TN border the road was paved, but it was still a fun one to drive. As the road opened up we all took a break and had a little impromptu photo shot at the site of an old junk store.




Our challenge for the day, other than driving SR32, Right Hand gap, and the Tail of the Dragon, was to photograph the oldest car visible from the rally route. Museum cars were explicitly forbidden. We managed to get a series of photos, each one a little older than the last. We finally ended up with a photo of what was left of a Ford Model-T. However the best looking old car we got was the Model-A and we even had a chance to chat with the owner for a bit and talked him into posing for our pictures. He was having a good time and loved all the attention his car was attracting. He even has shots of him running the Dragon on Killboy.com so it is not a trailer queen.


On our way to Gatlinburg we needed to stop and Jim needed to repair the driver's front brake on the bug. The lower shoe was hanging up and overheating the whole system. Eventually he figured out it was the wheel cylinder and he located a VW parts dealer further down the road. The parts place was not too far from the end of the Tail of the Dragon, so we wanted to be sure to stop in and get the new parts. Jim was able to free up the cylinder and got the brakes mostly working well before we went over Right Hand Gap. After leaving Cherokee NC they had to stop to make an adjustment, and Jeff finally fixed the exhaust droop we had been suffering with, the dragging just got worse and worse as we drove through the park. While none of the pipe was dragging, the bolts were and after a proper strap was added the dragging was cured. After the final repairs of the day, we went off to Deal's Gap and the Tail of The Dragon. It is a real fun road to drive, but I'm not sure it is worth the pilgrimage that we would have to make from this area. That being said, if you are in the area a little detour would be time well spent. Driving the Dragon requires inputs that are fairly quick. Not quite autocross quick, but far quicker than a normal road. I can only imagine what it would be like to drive it knowing that there is no oncoming traffic or speed enforcement, because it was closed for a stage rally or hill climb.


After getting through the Dragon, and finding our Model-T, we stopped at the VW shop for parts for the bug. I can tell you this that some of the junk parts cars were nicer than Rusty. Things just don't rust quite as badly in that area. Juanita, the owner, was very nice and helpful and had a ton of "new old stock" parts. Some of which Jim had only heard about. She had the parts ready and we spend more time poking our noses around and looking than actually shopping. After leaving we stopped by a Sonic drive in and then made our way to the hotel and the scoring table.

Day Four - Sunday May 27, 2007

Our challenge for the day was to collect photos of as many different state and Canadian provincial licence plates as possible. Any car anywhere was fair game. We needed to fill up the gas tanks and all before leaving, so we smoked the tires and then hit the brakes to get into the first station. From there we snapped photos of all the competitors and any other plates we could. After that we cruised the local hotel parking lots and by our count we had 24 different plates (23 states and one province). So we went to the local Waffle House for a good breakfast. On the way out we saw the marshals pulling out of the hotel. It was about 11:30 in the morning and all the other competitors were long gone. Needless to say they were a little concerned that we would do poorly for the day. When we got a chance to chat later in New Orleans, they were shocked to find out that we had about half our total already. We took a couple of side trips to gather our plate photos. One of which was to an airport parking garage where we wandered one of the levels taking photos. I know in this post 9/11 country that was not such a good idea, but we did not have a serious run in with Homeland Security while we were there. We drove though each of the little rest stops and a couple of TA truck lots and in the end we had 48 photos that counted (46 states, DC and Quebec). We cut this day fairly close to the deadline, because we just couldn't drive too quickly. I think the slower pace helped, but it was almost too slow. We even visited some on street and off street parking near the final hotel to grab the last few shots.

After turning in our points and checking in to the hotel, we had a final results ceremony, with snacks and such. It was not as nice as last year with the food and open bar, but 2006 was the first time and they lost quite a bit. If the crowd grows enough the party at the finish might be better.

As for the awards they were:

Biggest Pile of Crap
Team 47 - The Rickety Van, a 71 VW camper bus
Challenge Rankings: The following four teams were all within several hundred points
Honorable Mention
Team 56 - Trashwagon, Nice job Fox and Meghan.
Third Place
Team 50 - Two More Misfits, hey that's us!
Second Place
Team 46 - Queen and Country, three Brits and a semi convertible Oldsmobile
Champions
Team 05 - Misfit Toys Racing, Jim and Chris in the second place pile of crap

Day Five - Monday May 28, 2007

This day was mostly uneventful. After breakfast, we said goodbye to Raf who was staying in NOLA for a couple of days and then flying home. We hopped on the highway and basically cruised as fast as Rusty was comfortable with. About 11pm after we decided to push on through the night, we saw the Clutch Dumpers. They were the team with the pick flamingos. They were broken down on the side of the highway. They had stripped the threads on the passenger side rear axle of the Subaru wagon. After a failed attempt at field welding with the only hangar we had, Jim called AAA and got a tow dispatched. This little trip turned into the "Night 5 Party" as the Baked Potato crew stopped by as well. After about 3 hours the tow truck finally arrived and after it was loaded up and headed toward a hotel we got on the road again.

Day Six - Tuesday May 29, 2007

We drove all though the night and into the morning. The sun coming up over the road made for a couple of nice shots. We arrived at Jim's home about 2pm. We were drained and in need of way too much sleep. However we were able to be coaxed into taking a couple of final photos in Jim's backyard. Kelley did a wonderful job with them and they are the perfect ending to this adventure.

Epilogue

For Sale: 1986 Saab 900S, Rare notch back, reliable, motor sport pedigree, recently passed NJ state inspection.

Full size photos are available in the 2007 BABE Rally photo gallery.