Monday 14 September 2009

Days 9 & 10: Battle Mountain, NV

Unlike last year, we hapless volunteers were supposed to get up at Stupid o'clock on Sunday to assist in the movement of straw bales, as the local kids we'd bribed to help out wanted to finish in time to go to church.  Look, boys and girls, the Lord is a lot more likely to forgive you for missing one day's worship than I am to forgive you for making me get up at five ack emma.  Bah!

Fortunately, it appears that the alarm clock in my room has a quirk, in that moving the switch to "on" does not actually turn the alarm on.  No, in order to do that, the switch needs to go to "auto".  So I didn't have anything to do until the afternoon.  Hurrah!

The afternoon, though, consisted of wrapping disintegrating straw bales with that plastic binding tape stuff, for more kids to load onto a trailer and take out to the course.  And going out there ourselves to supervise the placing of the bales, as the recent resurfacing work has left some interesting holes around the culverts under the road.  General Organisational Stuffs and meetings and eating and so forth filled the rest of the day.

Really up at Stupid o'clock on Monday, and out to 305 for qualifying runs on the short course - a 2½ mile run-up.  As expected, Sam Whittingham was fastest, with a speed of 66.6 mph, with Barbara Buatois, Fast Freddy Markham and Yannick Lutz all exceeding 60 mph on their runs.  No runs over the full five+ mile course this morning, but by the time everyone had had at least one run, and we'd got back to the motel and held a debrief meeting, it was almost lunch time.  Less to do in the afternoon, so most people used it as an opportunity to catch up on missed sleep.

By the time we started to get ready to roll out to the course, however, the weather was looking distinctly blean, with heavy rain over the hills and a brisk wind blowing through the motel car park.  Experience has shown us, thobut, that conditions on the course can be completely different from those in town, so world+dog (Carl Mueller's excellent woof Pupita) traipsed out there anyway.  By the time I arrived, reports were filtering through from the launch area that it was chucking it down - Mike Sova's graphic description being "raindrops the size of meatballs".  So we were obliged to scrub the evening's competition.  This at least meant we were able to eat at a civilised hour and make innumerable gags about the propensity of almost every item on every menu at every eatery in the whole town to contain bacon, thereby causing Alice Krause narrowly to avoid snorting beer through her nose.  And then home.

Thought for the day: The "we hear" department says that during the resurfacing work, a Sinister Agent managed to sneak out to the site and deposit between the layers right in the timing area some of Gardner Martin's ashes.  Which is nice.

1 comment:

  1. Welp, you missed it, IT being a lot of good meals and booze over the weekend.

    (Plus I don't make foreigners get up at awk-o-clock when they are visiting.)

    You look good as a sheep. Don't let any lonely farmers see you.

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