This rally was an interesting one in many ways… planning it didn't really work out the way we have planned previous rallies. Roads didn't flow from planning to route as they had in the past… this one was more work.

The sections that we thought would be most difficult were, for the most part, non-issues and the sections that we figured were straight forward, trapped a few people. Going in, we thought it was a difficult rally, but most of the experienced teams faired pretty well.

As always, there were some interesting tricks and as usual, most of these tricks were unintentional. What seemed to have trapped most novices was "3rd Right". The first two rights were obvious, however, toward the end of the section, there was a forced right turn. The road that went straight was a dead end, therefore the forced right turn wasn't in fact a right at all - there was no other way to go.

At the check point and back at Applebee's, everyone seemed to have had a good time. No complaints about the route or the instructions (at least to our faces). Even the teams that were dreadfully off course seemed to have had a good time.

The route was beautiful; much of the route was along lakes, reservoirs, or mountain streams. That is the part of the rally that is missed by running at night. Basically, we went north to the Croton Reservoir, around it, then pretty much North to the Fahnestock State Park in Putnum County. When you reached Fahnestock, you turned left (at T) down a 4.5 mile dirt road and South back to Westchester.

One section of the route was doubled over twice for about 1 mile; we took the opportunity to place two Turkey signs along that section. One sign was hidden pretty well, low on the entry to a bridge and the other in plain site. Most teams found both.

The total distance of this rally was 62.5 miles, and the actual time was 2 hours 32 minutes and 1 second. The longest section without an instruction was 4.5 miles and it was a long section of dirt road. There were several sections of dirt roads, if you brought your autocross car (as at least 2 teams indicated they did), you suffered.

Based on the results, it was obvious that you could not have won on time alone, you needed to see Turkey signs as well, one team was 36 seconds off the actual time, but missed 5 signs which put them in 4th place. There were 8 teams within 200 seconds of the actual time, the winner was 101 seconds off and missed only 1 sign. The top 6 teams were all within 150 total points of each other so the 50 point signs were critical.

We waited at the check point until 1 hour after the last team should have finished, at that point half the teams had official times. Back at Applebee's, we collected 9 more answer sheets for finishers without official times, 10 teams were not accounted for. We hope to see you all again at our next rally, the Bunny Run Rally in late March or early April of 2006.

We greatly appreciate the efforts of Debbi and Gary for working registration, Ed for staging and holding down the fort, and especially Frank for everything else that needed doing. His contributions were invaluable and as always, producing the rally wouldn't have been as easy without him. We have come to depend on him as the "extra rallymaster" in our efforts to produce a rally on a skeleton crew.

Thanks for joining us for this rally, hope you enjoyed yourselves driving as much as we did planning it.

Jesse and Barbara, your 2005 Turkey Tour rallymasters