Today is one of the Championship Runs although it was not originally planned to be so. We were the 79th car out and Curtis n Bruce were the 80th car. We left Best Western High Desert at Official Start time plus your start order. Theresa and I got to sleep in just a bit. We got a good speedo run so we felt pretty good about the chances for the day. Early in the morning there was about 5 miles of roller coaster washboard road. Not much you can do there but TRY to keep speed. Hard to do.

We had lunch in Colusa California. Nice little town. Saw a cool rat rod similar to mine. 41 Ford pickup chopped channeled and ratted just right. There was also a beautiful 1920 Pierce 7 passenger touring car.

Leaving lunch we went back on the clock just outside town. We rallied about 5 minutes when we came up on a stop and go right 35. We saw all the traffic backed up including Great Race cars behind a flag man. We sat at the sop sign a minute until it looked like the traffic went through. We decided to go when it looked like he let them all through. We got up to the traffic quickly. There are a lot of things you can do to keep track of your time. We decelled 20 percent for 20 seconds and loss 4 seconds. Did that twice. Then we pulled over and kept the clock running with the plans of letting traffic by and submitting a time delay. I was proud of us! We kept presence of mind and worked it out. I think we got a 10 seconds on that leg although turning in a 5 minute 40 second time delay.

We saw some absolutely beautiful lakes up in Sierra Nevadas. Drove by Kirkwood Ski slopes. We tried to ski there this past winter but could not get there from Tahoe because of the huge amount of snow.

Curtis’s Packard is running well and so is the Shafer. Both cars are like mules smelling the barn. They know its about over and time to go home! I know this country boy is looking forward to coming home.

The whole town came out in Placerville. The streets were packed. They fed us gourmet pot pies and they were good. They gave each driver and navigator a bottle of wine. Everyone was happy to see us. We were pleased to be able to get out of the car.

We had a 50 minute drive to our hotel in Sacramento where we start en route to Vallejo. Buck Kamphausen has a cool museum there. Guess he will feed us.

Andrew and Jerry had quite an experience getting in to Placerville. The Rally master also prepares instructions for the support vehicles. Well, he routed the folks down HWY 49 which was way too small, curvy and dangerous for an 80 foot rig. Andrew said he thought that they would never get out of there. The tractor bottomed out on the trailer skid pads n all. If it wasn’t for a local guy who stopped traffic, they would have still been stuck!

From the road,

Corky