On June 5, we started from the Barking Kudu parking lot in Birmingham, AL around 9:30am-ish, surviving a night at the Medical Center Inn in Birmingham. It was a bit sketchy of a hotel, but the BABE Rally coordinator assured us he had stayed at worse places in Africa, so we should stop complaining.
I include this picture of the Stratus because it is/was like the one I had, except a year older, with the 2.0L four cylinder and 5 speed manual. Unfortunately, I learned later it never made it out of this parking lot under its own power. It crapped out right there in Birmingham, AL. I think I heard it had just north of
200K miles on it. Truly a shame. While it was a Chrysler product, with all the baggage that goes with that, my Stratus got similar mileage to Tojo; high 20s around town to low 30s on the highway. Take that!The challenge of the day was to drive from Birmingham to New Orleans and collect pictures of cracked windshields with various points assigned to relative length, number and whether a spider-web 'headshot'. It was surprisingly easy, as Alabamans seem to like cracked windshields. My best was a 'headshot', with to parallel cracks stretching across the windshield of a Geo Metro, taken in a rest area not far from Birmingham, with two people were sleeping in it.
In the end, we did make it, though Tojo's excessive heat generation continued to concern us. We were going about 60mph, with the heat on, grille removed but still having to pull over to let it cool off occasionally. Needless to say, we were getting passed by everyone...
If you can zoom in to the Caddie, you can see some sparks flying off of the muffler dragging on the road.
We arrived late afternoon-ish, and did the last 'bonus' challenge of finding a yellow Smart car in the French Quarter. If you look at the maps, that is why it looks like we're doing a search pattern because, we were doing a search pattern through the streets. We did find the car. After we checked in, we found that the hotel out of parking space, so they valet parked most of the cars! The rally usually uses a different hotel in the French Quarter ('who likes us' as the BABE Rally man said') but it was fully booked due a convention going on., we waited until final points were tallied, etc. We started waiting in earnest around 7:30pm in the lobby/elevator area. Someone is making a spoof music video with all of us in it, so he took some footage of that, which involved some singing. That made the hotel manager cranky and they eventually booted us outside. That not being enough, they decided they didn't like us being outside in front of the hotel, so they told us to leave, so we went to the hotel's tiny parking lot across the street. Hotel Security didn't like that, so they told us to move someplace else. We found a vacant lot, but apparently were told to move again.
Needless to say, no one among us was happy with the Clarion in New Orleans. Finally we had the awards ceremony. RWN didn't win anything, it turns out. On cue, the short bus and Matador pulled in late. I'll relate the travails of the bus and Matador as best I can. The Matador had been running with the bus when the bus broke down (water pump came loose, ended up destroying the fan). On the way to get parts, the Matador broke down close to the parts store. After pushing it the rest of the way attempts were made to locate a new distributor for it. Locals in the store were calling around to buddies they thought might 'have some AMC's in the back yawrd'. Someone came in with a bunch of distributors that weren't right. Eventually, someone else rolled up, inquired and rolled out to return later with the right distributor for a 304 AMC V8 from a collection in his backyard. The Matador was said to have never run so well after the 'new' distributor.
After all that, we did some strolling down Bourbon Street and went back to the hotel.
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