one last rally

Next month's TCNE rally -- the last of the series -- is coming together. I went out and did some fun exploration with my mother (who's visiting East Coast family this week). We found a couple of great roads but concluded that they wouldn't fit into the concepts I have in mind for this rally; I have now convinced myself that there is no further need to find new roads, and so I have set the route and done all the map work. I know the roads well enough to write preliminary route instructions. But I still need to drive the route twice to finalize and check the route instructions, and then hand it off to Fred for the pre-check.

This particular rally is being a lot of fun for me, as it's a format I haven't put on before, and I have also managed to pull off a trick that has been tried before without success, namely a complete absence of speed changes. Woo! Nearly the entire rally is on roads posted at 30 MPH, and the few places that aren't are brief enough that I can put in a pause or a short transit to keep them legal.

star market in high gear

When, at six o'clock on the day before Thanksgiving, the local grocery store staffs every checkout lane with a cashier and a bagger, the limit on how much business they can do is not the throughput of their checkout system, but the throughput of their door.