I don't like Thursdays anymore

What can I say, there are days when it's good to be a racing driver, and there are days when it's not. Thursdays are not, at least not for us.

The day dawned cool and beautiful. We had a long transit from Clarenville out to the Burin Peninsula, jutting southwest into the Atlantic. The area is renowned for its beauty, and all I can say is that words don't do it justice. It's the sort of landscape you'd never expect to find on a little known island off Eastern Canada.

The lush vegetation and rolling hills give way to a harsher, stonier terrain, the granite outcroppings bulging quietly out of the earth, littered with the timeless detritus of the passing ancients in a land sculpted by glaciers surging implacably downhill, molding rock and earth alike under their grinding mass. Even though that was long, long ago, the current lay of the land bears witness to the forces of those times.

We started our day cruising out through the stark remainders of the glacial age, headed toward Harbour Mille. This is probably my favorite stop, simply because the setting is so period picturesque, taking us back in time to a simpler time in a remote fishing village. It's so stark, and yet so amazingly beautiful. Keep an eye on the pictures section of the blog for some shots, it's worth the wait.

The morning stages were fast and fun, into and out of Harbour Mille, and then on to Mooring's Cove. I'm happy to say that we cleaned all three of those stages before heading into the battleground that is Marystown, where we tackle not only tight streets and heavy doses of bumps and gravel, but also parking lots and alleyways, literally.

The car has been great, and we did well. We actually made up some useful time on the class competition and were feeling good.

That's about the time that it remembered it was Thursday. Last year on Thursday we hit a house. This year, in the middle of the Marystown South stage, our radiator mouting bolt decided to try it's luck amongst the gravel of Marystown, rather than holding our radiator in place. As a result, the radiator fell against the front pulley of the motor, grinding several small holes in it, allowing all of our engines coolant, one of its precious vital fluids, to escape. This, as you might surmise, is bad. Very bad indeed.

We tried to pull over and make some emergency repairs, but without the spare radiator that our crew had, we were unable to effect any meaningul repairs. As we sat on the roadside second guessing our actions, we also saw our hopes of a competitive finish slip away, one drip into the Burin sand at a time. Newfoundland is rife with ponds, lakes, streams, rills and brooks, and now there's one more little puddle, an inchoate little pond, courtesy of our little Henna M3.

As it happened, we missed two stages before continuing. In that time, I had the opportunity to redefine the term irony.

We finally broke down in front of the "Lucky House Restaurant", which is a Chinese place that served us some sweet and sour chicken and fortune cookies.

This is ironic because of course in the afternoon of Thursday last year we hit a house, and today was very unlucky for us. To further illustrate the point, we were on the way to a town called Fortune. Instead, we sat and ate fortune cookies by chance.

Unlucky indeed.

It's a hard thing to swallow, especially when your hopes are up and the tide seems to be rising, but, as they say, that's racing, so we'll live with it. The plus side is that now the pressure's off, so we can just have fun tomorrow and bring the car home for a finish at the waterfront in St. John's.
On a lighter note, as we continued through the final three stages of the day, we came across the fateful house from last year, with Nick fully intending to exorcise his demons on the shores and doorsteps of Garnish. He dutifully missed the house, but it was worth noting that the plucky homeowner had decided to take some extra precautions. There were tire barricades and several 55 gallon oil drums placed out in front of the house, so a competitor would have to plow through all that before reaching her house. Quite improvisational I must say.

We'll have an update tomorrow afternoon, as well as pictures and video to come, so keep an eye on the blog and we'll be back soon.

Cheers,