Truthful Tuesday — Road Rallies

Fandango4 Comments

Frank, aka PCGuyIV, is back with another episode of Truthful Tuesday. The idea behind Truthful Tuesday is for us to respond to the question (or questions) Frank asks and to be 100% truthful in our responses. No glib answers, no funny business, no fibs. Just raw honesty.

For this week’s Truthful Tuesday, Frank wants to know…

Are there any hobbies or pastimes that you have abandoned that you occasionally consider taking up again? If so, do you actually give it a try again, or does something keep you from giving it another go?

The only pastime that I abandoned that I would occasionally consider taking up again is driving in road rallies. Do you know what road rallies are? It’s not drag racing or driving at high speeds around a track or a dirt obstacle course. I was never a race car driver. Road rallies are much more civilized than those things. So what, then, is a road rally?

It’s essentially a scenic drive with a purpose, a chance to enjoy a day with a friend, and the least expensive form of motorsport. Road rally events do not involve speed, teams do not need specialized equipment for their car. Basically, all that is needed are pens, paper, and a wristwatch.

Touring rallies are events where the emphasis is on staying on-time and arriving at each checkpoint at precisely the correct time. These are also known as Time-Speed-Distance (TSD) events and they use easy to follow route instructions to guide contestants along roads that are fun to drive. In addition to instructions, which include average speeds, sometimes the mileage is given for each route instruction, which makes the course even easier to follow. 

Teams compete to see who is the best at reading the route instructions carefully, following the route, and maintaining the assigned average speeds. Each team is made up of two people, with one of them — the driver — keeping eyes on the road and the other — the navigator — reading directions, figuring out times, and helping spot landmarks.  

Competition is measured by when teams arrive at precisely-measured checkpoints set up along the rally route where the exact arrival time has been calculated based on the designated average speeds. Penalty points are assigned if a team arrives at a checkpoint late or early. The further off the time, the more points the team gets and when the time comes to hand out trophies, the lowest score wins.  

When I was in my twenties and was going through my British roadster phase, I used to compete in road rallies at least once a month, sometimes twice a month if I could convince one of the guys to be my navigator. I would occasionally invite a girl to be my navigator, but I found that most of the girls who navigated for me were more interested in the scenery and talking than reading maps and keeping time.

I think I came in third twice but never took home the big trophy. And that was fine. I did it mostly as an excuse to explore beautiful sunny days and scenic roads in my sports cars with the top down.

Then I met my future wife, married her, and she got pregnant. My British roadsters were replaced by station wagons and minivans. It just wasn’t the same.

Would I do it again? I suppose, if I could find a local road rally group that would welcome a septuagenarian, could persuade my wife to be my navigator, and use my little EV, then I might. I would have to learn some new rules about how modern technology can be applied because things like GPS navigation didn’t exist back in the day.

Fandango’s Story Starter #149

Fandango4 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

“You don’t know me, but I’m the ex-wife of your new boyfriend,” the woman said to Pamela when she answered her door, “and he’s not who you think he is.”

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

FOWC with Fandango — Honestly

Fandango8 Comments
FOWC

Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “honestly.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, ÿplease manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.

Judy’s Numbers Game — #21

Fandango1 Comment

Judy Dykstra-Brown has come up with a weekly prompt that she calls “The Numbers Game.” This week’s number is 142. To play along, we need to go to our media/photo file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos we find under that number and include a link to our blog back to Judy’s Numbers Game blog of the week.

Here’s my collection of photos based upon “142.” All of the photos below have appeared in my blog posts. Some are photos posted by other bloggers as photo prompts. Some are screenshots or photos that I took. A few may have been generated by AI art apps, but most are photos I grabbed from free photo sources like Pixabay, Pexels, Pinterest, Unsplash, or Google photos.

Click on any photo to enlarge.