Justin put together a nice short video. Please view it by clicking here.

After the awards were given, we went out for a night on the town with the Misfit Toys Racing teams - great night, which miraculously I remember all of. Monday - Memorial Day - we went on an airboat tour, a great experience, and with a great guide named Steve with the perfect Louisiana drawl who demonstrated that indeed, marshmallows are the equivalent of “swamp crack” to the alligators in the bayou. That evening Nick and Jen flew home - wasn’t the original plan, but we had discussed with the Bonanzathon guys and the Misfits teams the idea of staying an extra night and caravaning home together - Nick and Jen unfortunately couldn’t stay the extra day but were happy to fly home and have a day of recuperation before going back to work on Wednesday. The extra night was great - a relaxed evening by the pool with drinks, and a leisurely walk down Bourbon Street later that evening really allowed the “vacation” side of things to sink in after the frenetic events of the past week.

Now, for the drive home. The Bonanzathon guys - Jesse, Krikor, and Brian - had sold their Golf the day previous as it simply wasn’t worth it to try to get it the 1200 miles home @ 13mpg. So instead, they just decided to forgo the gas mileage concerns and just be completely uncomfortable in our Saab! With bags, a large cooler, and an ammo can strapped to the roof, and the trunk loaded to the gills, the 5 of us piled into the Saab to caravan home with the Mustang and the Miata. With that much weight and wind resistance in the car, we basically had the pedal to the floor the entire way home to maintain highway speeds, and the rear tires rubbed over any dips in the road. From 9am until about 7:15am the next day, we drove straight through except for bathroom/food/roadside repair stops (when the Miata lost its clutch), taking shifts driving each of the cars. I thoroughly enjoyed my shift in the Miata - nice night drive with the top down and great conversation with Krikor. The Mustang shift was a little less enjoyable, mainly because I was more tired, and the steering took a LOT more attention than the Miata to keep on course. This, however, was somewhat offset by the humor of the blue neon lights flashing on the speaker box in the back seat whenever we turned up the music. I’m sure it looked like a rave from outside the car. After the last fuel stop, we split off from the Misfits and headed up 81 on our own, aiming for Hanover, PA. There we were, on the last 30 miles before home all short on sleep, and what were all of us doing? Searching for our next year’s BABE Rally car in every driveway and parking lot we passed.

Once we arrived in Hanover, we unpacked our stuff from the Saab, and sent the Bonanzathon team back home to Philly with the Saab - we’ll pick it up next weekend. It’s parked in the driveway of Krikor’s house in a nice Philadelphia suburb, with his parents’ 2008 Lexus and his 2007 Civic Si. Needless to say, I’m sure the neighbors love it.

After a day of sleep, and two days of work since the end of the event, I think we’re all busily trying to relate to coworkers, friends, and family how amazing this experience has been, which of course is impossible to do. And, naturally, we’re all trying to dream up something rustier, louder, less reliable, and more ridiculous for next year.

Day 4 - this is it, a 400 something mile drive through HOT, humid Alabama, Mississippi, and on into Louisiana. Working AC is a phenomenon that rarely shows itself in a BABE car, and ours definitely doesn’t have it - but at least all the manual window regulators work, though the back seat is something akin to a wind tunnel with all of them down.

We gather our things, pack the car, check fluids and tire pressures, make sure the roof-mounted Corvette is positioned for maximum downforce, and grab a bite to eat at the hotel’s continental breakfast. A group photo was set up in the Lowes parking lot next door, so as people get their cars packed and ready to go, the group steadily trickles over there and lines up. Challenge packets are handed out - more on that a little later. Naturally, 50+ crap cars in a single place with plenty of people standing on roofs taking pictures doesn’t go unnoticed, and the police arrive within 15 minutes. Justin - one of the two organizers of the event - works his magic, and within a few minutes the police are barricading off the highway the hotel sits along so we can all depart as a group!

On to the challenge - if it can really be called that. More of a side project for the first 100 miles of the drive. This is both good and bad - good because we knew we’d get full points for the challenge and so would everybody else, thereby keeping us in the lead as long as our car made it to New Orleans, but bad because it meant the top 3 - who were all within 30 points of each other - wouldn’t have the fun and nerve-wracking intensity of competition that day. The challenge was to stop at 6 BP stations along the route, and get a picture of your team in front of pump 1 at the station. This could have been hard if there were only 6 or 7 BP’s along the route and if you missed one you were in trouble, but literally, there were BP’s every 10 miles for much of the route, at LEAST a dozen or more. I’d say every group had their pictures within the first 100 miles of the day - after that the trick was GETTING there, and doing it and getting your pictures submitted prior to the 7:30 deadline.

Most of these cars on the rally had never been driven in REALLY warm weather, and many of them - including ours - started running warm. As I pulled in behind a group parked along the side of the road about 170 miles from New Orleans, I watched the temp skyrocket and quickly shut off the car - popped the hood, and what do you know - one of our cooling fans had stopped working. The second one that still worked, we knew the bearings weren’t so hot - when it shut off, it would stop almost immediately instead of spinning free for a few seconds. Also, what looked like oil smoke was wafting up from the exhaust manifold - something I’d never seen before for sure. THAT’S enough to make you nervous when it’s 90+ outside, you’re 170 miles from the finish, and in the lead with less than an hour of time as a buffer before the deadline in case something goes REALLY wrong.

We had no choice but to move on, but from then on were keeping an eagle eye on coolant temp and listening intently for any new noises from the drivetrain. As long as we were moving, temps were OK, but we just had to be a little careful to pull into gas stations and shut off the car quickly when we needed to stop (which we frequently did, since Bonanzathon was still rolling with us and getting their usual 13mpg). So we plowed on, and the car was still doing great - our fears of overheating or losing oil pressure were fading away as the miles passed.

Perhaps 60 miles from the finish, who blew by us but the 01 and 03 cars - the Misfit Toys Racing teams, who came in first and third place last year - the very same Mustang and Miata that we started our trip up to New York with, ran the Tail of the Dragon with, and now were going to finish the event with. It was almost a poetic way to finish the event, so we bade farewell to the Bonanzathon guys, who still needed another gas stop, and put the pedal down - wrangled up all of our 128 horses - to keep up with the Misfits teams.

The final hour into New Orleans was still nerve-wracking, but fascinating at the same time as we watched the still Katrina-ravaged landscape unfold. I can only imagine what it must have looked like for BABE 2006 - even now, almost 3 years after Katrina, there are so many areas scarred by abandoned and partially destroyed buildings. We followed the two other cars into New Orleans, down Canal Street for a brief time before we headed to the hotel on Dauphine, one block off Bourbon Street. We’d made it - the car in one piece, us in one piece, we were there.

Now a bit of parking humor - picture 50 of the worst cars you’ve ever seen on the road, pulling up to a very nice hotel in New Orleans that happens to be valet parking only. Add to that the fact that only one of the valets can drive a manual transmission car, and many of these cars won’t idle well, won’t shift well, have manual switches for the radiator fan, etc… and it makes for quite the pileup of BABE cars waiting to be parked in the hotel’s valet lot. Some are so bad that the valet simply can’t park them, and has to just direct the owner where to park it.

Awards occurred at 8pm, after Justin had received the day’s challenge pictures from all the arriving teams and tabulated scores. Most teams were thrilled just to have made it - as were we - but the idea that we’d won was almost unbelievable. The awards for Biggest Pile of Rubbish and Spirit of the Event both went to Tossers with Tetanus - two adventurers who took a 1971 Triumph Spitfire that nobody would ever mistake for a roadgoing automobile, and somehow made it through the rally. 3rd place - team William Penn’s Hat; 2nd place - Misfit Toys Racing, Jim and Chris in the General Lee Mustang who had won the previous year; 1st place - Team Born from Jets!

We got to hold a massive masterfully-crafted trophy made of auto parts for the evening - but ultimately had to give it back, Stanley Cup style. We each got a nice 1st place medal, a small trophy, $1500 which will be split between the 4 of us, and registration paid for next year - all great, but secondary compared to the experience of a lifetime.

There will be repetition in this post of what others have already posted - but I’m finally back to the real world and need to relate my experiences from days 2, 3, and 4 - as well as the post-rally events.

Day 2 - Superman Day
The challenge sounded relatively simple - get pictures taken in 3 small towns along the way of the entire team, the car, and a local in front of a public building with the town name visible on it. We were given 12 towns to pick from - 4 each in groups A, B, and C - you pick one town from each group to make your 3. The towns that the FEWEST teams visit are the ones that will award the most points. Of course - with 58 teams all thinking of how to figure out which towns will be the least visited - there really is no strategy you can work out that will be guaranteed to work. The strategy we chose - visit the town that is the farthest north off 81 in each group.

This means Superman day was a LONG DAY, turning what would have been a 338-mile jaunt down 81 into a 477-mile trip through some of the twistiest, most interesting roads that Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee had to offer. Our stops were Monterey VA, Welch WV, and Jonesville VA before heading down to the hotel in Newport, TN. Let’s just say that being in a spraypainted battleSaab full of Supermen in Welch, WV and the outlying tiny towns isn’t always fun. We SHOULD have shared this day with another team, as having another car full of Supermen with us would have made some parts a little more bearable - we know this now for next year. We just figured, with the challenge hinging on going to towns that hopefully nobody else visited, that we should go it alone. A key moment was getting out of the car in a Subway parking lot in Welch when kids on a school bus that was waiting to pull out yelled “GO HOME, FRUIT LOOPS!” in a southern accent. The people in Subway, though, were relatively welcoming…the looks from the coal miners getting out of their trucks at WV gas stations indicated they probably were not quite as open to the idea of guys wearing blue tights.

Night 2, we arrived in Newport at around 9:30 - an 11.5 hour day on the road. Some of the roads we had driven on day 2 were just impossible to describe, and the scenery was amazing. Once the scoring was tabulated the next day, it turns out our choices of towns put us in first place, particularly our stop in Jonesville. We passed THROUGH Norton, VA - another town in group C - to get to Jonesville, and LOTS of teams hit Norton, but I believe we were the only team to hit Jonesville, or at least one of very few.

I’m pretty sure the pizza we ordered once we arrived at the hotel was quite possibly the best thing I have ever tasted.

Day 3 - Tail of the Dragon Day
We found out that day 3 would not have a challenge - just get through the route, enjoy the scenery, and don’t fly off the edge of any of the mountain roads we would be traversing that day. One of the best decisions we made on day 3 was to stick with Team #29, Bonanzathon of the Living Dead. Their 1985 Volkswagen Golf was getting literally 12-13mpg the entire trip, just dumping fuel despite everyone’s best efforts to fix it. The plus side of this gas mileage was that they could shoot flames from their exhaust at will, with the downside being $50 fillups every 120 miles and roughly 2/3 the power their car should have been making.

Not far from the starting line, the route took us onto a treacherous climb up a gravel road zig-zagging up the side of a mountain, no guardrail - the kind of road that made you wonder if this could possibly be the correct route. We followed a train of BABE cars up the mountain, not pushing the corners too much for fear of death - upon arriving at the bottom of the gap on the other side of the mountain, an impromptu BABE gathering of 20ish cars confirmed that we had indeed gone the correct way.

We continued on through Gatlinburg, TN - a tourist-packed town that looked like a part of Disney World between the people, attractions, and general decor. From there, we climbed up into the Great Smoky Mountains, for some amazing scenic overlooks and consequently a few stops for photo opportunities. It was at one of these stops that I got an explanation of the word “Bonanzathon” from Jesse - bonanza: a sudden acquisition of wealth; thon: the latin word for tuna - therefore, Bonanzathon = the sudden acquisition of a wealth of tuna.

A good ways further up the road, and we finally arrive at Deal’s Gap - Tail of the Dragon - 318 turns in 11 miles of road - a hugely popular destination for car enthusiasts and motorcyclists nationwide. We were originally planning on just heading through once and continuing on our way, but the Bonanzathon guys all wanted a shot at it - 3 drivers, so up, back, and up again - so what the heck, we figured me, Nick, and Chrissy would all take a shot. We met at the base of the road with a few other teams in a small parking lot, unstrapped the cooler, left Jen to hold down the fort as she feared for her life with Nick and I driving the Gap, and proceeded on our way for run 1, with me behind the wheel.

I beat the CRAP out of the Saab on that run. More or less at or near redline in second gear the whole way, the Saab stuck right with the General Lee Mustang convertible and the Miata. Unfortunately, about a third of the way into the run, we got stuck behind an inconsiderate Harley rider who thought 20mph was a great speed and refused to pull off anywhere to let anyone pass. Even with that, I was hard enough on the car that the brakes were REALLY dodgy by the end of the run, so we let them cool for a while. Nick had a similar return run, getting a bit of speed for the first bit and then getting stuck behind some bikers. Once we had strapped the cooler back on and retrieved Jen from the starting point, Chrissy took her turn, and had a great run - lots of fun and well worth spending some extra time on this section. We got some photos of the GORGEOUS view at the end of the Gap - those in Nick’s flickr account with the dam off to the right are taken of that view.

The rest of the run was mostly spent just trying to get to the night 3 hotel in Fort Payne, Alabama - but along the way we passed a yard sale with a pinkish/purple Power Wheels Corvette. It took me about 3 seconds of thought to realize we must own that Corvette, even if just for roof rack eye-candy. We turned around about a mile up the road and headed back to buy it - $20 poorer and a few minutes later, and our Saab had a Corvette convertible on the roof. I’m pretty sure this lowered our gas mileage by another 2mpg or so, but WE HAD A PINK CORVETTE CONVERTIBLE ON THE ROOF!

Night 3 hotel was when we found out we were in the lead, if only by 20 points. The 4 of us ate a giddy “we might actually win this” dinner at Waffle House before joining the parking lot festivities of the evening. I ended up spending a good late night with Jim and Chris of the 01 Misfit Toys Racing team - the winners last year. Obviously at that point we all knew we’d be running against each other for first the next day, but we were quickly past that and just had an awesome evening of various talk, finally retiring for the night at around 2am.

My updates on Day 4 and the days following the end of the rally will be posted soon.

Nick was nice enough to take the time to put up a few of our best pictures on Flickr. There will be more posted but for now, check these out. They are fantastic!

BABE 2008 Flickr Set

Sorry for the delay in posting… there was much celebrating to do Sunday night because WE WON! We came in 1st place! WOO HOO!!

We never thought we’d win. We just wanted to have a good time and make it to New Orleans but on day 1, we were in the lead so we figured we’d do our best to keep it that way. Luckily, we made some really good choices during challenges and ended up keeping our lead. To make a long story short, the fact that our car was built in 1989 helped us secure our lead. Newer cars were having an easier time so they lost points for being newer. Had our car been built in 1990, we would have lost 80 points and been pushed back to 3rd place. Thankfully, the build date was November 1989. Thank you, SAAB. You helped us win!

The prize was $1500 and some awesome 1st place medals. We also got to hold onto a trophy made of auto parts for the night and returned it the next morning. Kind of like the Stanley Cup. It was awesome. We celebrated on Bourbon Street and had a great night.

Ben and Chrissy spent an extra night in New Orleans and Nick and I flew home yesterday. It was nice to have a day off before work to just relax and recover from the trip.

We can’t wait to come back next year. Our registration fee is waived for next year since we won and we get to have the number 01 for our team. We will definitely be back but we may end up splitting the team into 2 groups. It turns out that strength in numbers will hurt your points. The more people on your team, the easier some challenges become so they dock points accordingly.

We also went on a swamp tour in Jean Lafitte, LA yesterday. It was amazing. I got to hold a baby alligator and it was so incredibly awesome. I’d always wanted to go on a swamp tour and now I can check it off my to-do list. If you’re ever in the area, definitely check it out. It’s worth every penny.

Thanks to everyone who followed our journey. Thanks for the support and encouragement and comments. It was such a great experience.

Right Hand Gap and Deal’s Gap were amazing. The Saab 900 performed beyond any one’s expectations. Through The Dragon, we were able to stay close on the tail of a 5.0 Mustang and early 90’s Miata. The body would roll, the revs were high, but it held it’s on and stuck to the line without fail.

Filling up just before the gap, were able to average 25 MPG even with 3 runs of the Dragon. Sitting at redline for nearly an hour and a half, the Saab never missed a beat. There are a lot of new sounds, but it held it together on what was likely it’s toughest day. Even still, I’m not sure it’ll make it home.

Today we’re on to New Orleans with a challenge today. Wish us luck!

Day 3 pictures below.

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Hi. I”m the member of the team that hasn’t posted. I’ve been so wrapped up in the day to day fun that I haven’t ventured to post on this board. so, heres day 3.

So, we started out early today, 9am. drove for a long time, up through the Great Smokey State Park to about 5000 feet, then on to Deals gap, or tail of the dragon. ran it 3 times and the Saab did better than expected. We were keeping up well with other people. We drove it 3 times, 3 different drivers. Ben drove the first, Nick drove the second and I drove the last leg. Then plenty of more driving after that.

We made it successfully today. it was a long day with not a whole lot of miles. Tomorrow is a crazy long day, 470  miles plus a challange.

Ok thats all for now. I’m tried and have alot of driving and car time tomorrow.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures from yesterday. My costume was comfortable the but the men complained all day. so we’re glad today’s stuff didnt require us to wear a costume and get laughed at when we doing normal things.

After the longest day, we arrived safely at our hotel around 9:30. Crazy locals, treacherous (yet fun!) roads, and inflexible costumes could not keep us down. Our challenge was to go to 3 small towns and take photographs of ourselves with local residents in front of buildings displaying the town’s name. Some towns embraced an oddly painted Saab 900 full of Supermen, others did not. Stopping for gas was only made more stressful by a pump that took nearly 8 minutes to pump 10 gallons.

Aside from odd looks from strangers, we made it out without a scratch. Photos of our experiences are below!

Today - Day 3 - Tail of the Dragon - Deal’s Gap - Wish us luck!

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We are dressed as Super Man and ready to go. We have to go to 3 small towns and get photos with the locals. We were all given 3 groups of towns and had to pick one town from each group. The trick is to pick towns you think other teams won’t to to. This is, understandably, going to add about 5 hours to our drive to New Port, TN.

This will be a very long but rewarding day. We will have plenty of pics later. The superman costumes are hilarious. More to come later. We’re off to Monterey, VA.