The Misadventures of Kate & Josh

While I do need to write a passage on how fun it was to see Seattle with Josh, his dad and Matt, the best tour guide ever, I think I need to process yesterday to get my head around this rally. What did you get us into, Joshua?

We arrived for our training day in the hotel in Kirkland, WA. The lot was lined with vehicles that had similar setups to ours, with front grills smiling sinisterly, reeling for adventure. Roof racks lined with a mean-looking shovel, gas canisters and bright red traction matts tacked down. Many others brought two spare tires, I was glad to see this doesn’t seem like a waste of space. Everyone packs their vehicles to the brim and it’s nice to know I’m not being girly or extra demanding room to bring what I think I need. After all, I did sacrifice my curling iron and heels at home, for the sake of compromise.

We entered the hotel to find a motley crew of adults aged 30 and beyond. At nearly 40, we are one of the few younger pairs, and I’m sure we looked naive, unsure of what we just entered into. There are a lot of impressive beards and not an unsensible shoe in sight. The class actually started early as everyone had arrived.

The first thing they taught us was “never pass gas or water.” Yeah, I got the pun, but this is pretty serious survival stuff. The Arctic is actually a desert. In fact, the largest desert in the world is Antartica. There are stretches where we have to calculate the gas mileage to determine how much gas we are going through because the stations are so far apart. Some of the stations up north sometimes carry something called “bad gas” that won’t get you as far. Rally rules include leave on your assigned time, and don’t run on someone else’s minute. Know the car in front and behind. When you are done for the day, you are not done. There is always prep for the next day. And if you’re late, everything will be closed so make friends driving ahead that can order your dinner so it’s waiting for you.

Then, I learned that I’m going to be doing a lot of calculations this whole trip. I knew I’d have to do a little math to calculate the increments for the Time-Speed-Distance competitive portions. They handed us a rule book with directions for the entire trip. Everyone gets them at that instance, so you cannot prepare ahead of time. For these TSD sections, they give you the average speed you need to travel and the total mileage you need to reach. So I needed to convert that into the times needed to reach each checkpoint. You get docked for every second over or under.

While one person goes out to the car, to get safety equipment checked off, the others took their books and ran off to corners of the hotel to crunch 10 days worth of numbers. So, this was going to be my job. Who knew I signed up for a mathematician’s dream vacation?

Fortunately, I am pretty handy with numbers. I whipped out my macbook and created a series of Excel formulas. I’ll let you in on my tactic. First, calculate the increment mileage. That number is called “delta mileage” in the rally world. What you what is time so next column is Time = (Distance X 60) / Speed. But the problem is that it gives you minutes in hundredths, not seconds. So 1.5 minutes isn’t 1 min and 50 seconds, it’s 1 minute and 30 seconds. So, I converted the minutes into seconds. And then I converted that into a time format, dividing total seconds by 86400. Then, you add them to get each time at each checkpoint. Easy right?

The spreadsheet I created should make it easy to plug the numbers in each day and generate the time at checkpoints, but we will see how today goes first. I’m nervous and work up at 5, so I finally got up and made some burnt hotel coffee and cracked open this laptop. We have a ceremonial start today, with the cars all leaving in their assigned timeslot. Car “0” leaves at 8:00:00 and we are car 32, leaving at 8:32:00. The first TSD begins at 9:30:00, so ours begins at 10:02:00. Make sense?

Wish us luck! I know Josh wanted us to be the new prodigies that sweep in and win every race, but I think even he has wrapped his head around the fact that we have no idea what we are doing and are in a group with professionals and teams that have done this for over 30 years. We’ve agreed, if the goal isn’t to have fun, we aren’t going to make it. What we have really signed up for is the immersion therapy version couple’s therapy. We are in a competition, in extreme conditions, trapped in a small space together for ten days. So, we’d better have some darn fun, right?

Pics to come later–I’ve gotta start packing.

Note: I realized in writing today that WordPress doesn’t use autocorrect like Microsoft Word. Please be kind in your judgment, as I’m a child of the autocorrect generation, despite my mom’s efforts. (Love you!)

I learned about this event through Josh who has been trying to find the right year to go for the better part of a decade. In my experience, rarely are there right times for things to happen. If we don’t spring for adventures we want to take, life picks other adventures for us. So he signed us up, we worked out work and school and he started researching and ordering car parts and I started ordering winter clothing.

To be perfectly honest, I am quite nervous about driving to the ends of the earth, not quite knowing what to expect. There are accidents that can happen, wild animals, injuries, and unfortunately, due to my interest in true crime, I’m aware that there are serial killers running amok along the exact highways we will be taking. But the photos and videos of untouched pristine snow-blanked nature do look beautiful. And I have never been shy about traveling somewhere new. So Josh’s longtime dream is now shared and we’ll figure it out together.

The Alcan 5000 is a rally that is in its 32nd anniversary since 1988. It happens every 18 months, so there are winter rallies and summer rallies, and we are rookies headed into our first winter rally. This year, we will be driving 5120 miles up to the Arctic circle and back down to Anchorage.

There are 41 vehicles registered for the event with a driver and a navigator. There are six vehicles carrying staff for the event, in case of emergencies and to keep timing and scoring. It’s apparently common for people to drop out at the last minute, but I imagine at least 30 will make it. You can follow us on the official map. Josh and I are A32.

Right now, I have a very limited concept of a rally. From what I understand is that there are all types. There will be days where we compete TSD, or time speed distance, where you have to make it to certain check points within an assigned time, down to the second. We have a rally computer hooked into the car to help us do so. If that fails, it’s down to a calculator and notepad.

One of the things I look forward to seeing is Tuktoyaktuk, one of the last places where indigenous culture is preserved. There is a 73-stretch of ice that forms a highway on the MacKenzie River every year, slowly disappearing due to climate change. There are hot springs–one of my favorite past times. I have my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to see the northern lights.

I’m trying to travel with an open mind (and a LOT of emergency gear) and grateful to make some new memories on a wild adventure with the man I love.

Josh put an incredible amount of work (and $) into creating this beautiful monstrosity worthy of a zombie apocalypse. With every addition, I felt slightly more Southern, riding around in sleek yet tough-looking machine. Surprisingly, I love it. It’s pretty darn fun.

Josh brought home this Nissan Xterra in New Hampshire years ago along with its belly of rust from the New England salt air. Hence, its name: The Yankee. He replaced everything–EVERYTHING. Many Sunday late nights this winter he still was working away in the garage, trying to get as much done as possible. I would occasionally wander in to pretend I am a mechanic’s assistant. I now know what a ratchet and a socket are. The concept of torque came up frequently. I learned many thick screws that need to be put in important places, can barely be reached, let alone seen, and this is something that someone who suffers anxiety like myself, should probably not know. I observed a number of frightening-looking and important items coated in iron oxide being removed and discarded. Josh replaced them with their smooth, stealthy, contemporary counterparts. Very quickly, seemingly overnight, the truck which I felt safe and protected in to begin with, became a truck which I know I’m safe and protected in in very extreme circumstances.

Josh became a tire connoisseur. He researched them day and night, determined to find tires that would do well on the road and in snow, without affecting the gas mileage drastically. We’d be out running errands and Josh would roll down the window to chat with our neighbor, also waiting at a stop light, to ask about how their specialized tires affected the gas mileage. I would estimate that 90% of the time, the dude in the other truck made up the answer. Most people don’t think about as many details they way that Josh does–he never obsesses, he just does the research and pays attention–it’s an easy quality to love.

To those worried about our carbon footprint (Hi Mom!), it gets the equivalent of what the Xterra had with its factory-grade before-the-makeover tires.

Maybe Josh should tell you exactly what he did… [Josh to list stuff here. He has quite a lot of driving to do, folks…]