Summer Sizzle Road Rally, run on July 18, 2021
One of the many benefits of being a member of the PCA Northern New Jersey Region is the great diversity of activities you and your family can attend. Not only do we offer Driver Education events on some of the best Racetracks in the Northeast, but we also conduct a series of Autocross events at Pocono Raceway and social events like the recent end of June annual summer picnic and BBQ.
Another fun family activity that the club offers is our simple-to-follow ‘Gimmick’ Road Rallies. Gimmick rallies are not the high-speed Performance Rallies you might see on ESPN, where helmeted Drivers and Navigators go ‘flying’ down dirt back roads in Sweden or New Zealand. Nor are they like Time-Speed-Distance rallies, which require precise driving/navigation skills to stay ‘on-time’ to the hundredth of a minute and arrive at a series of Checkpoints along the route. Gimmick Rallying can be attended by the entire family and only requires a good sense of humor and a couple of hours of your time on a Sunday afternoon.
The type of rallies that NNJR-PCA puts on are known as Question and Answer ‘Gimmick’ Rallies. Each Team (as many as you can safely fit in your car) is given a set of written Route Instructions that provide simple turn-by-turn instructions for a 50-60 mile route, and most are easily driven in 2 or 2 ½ hours. Interspersed between the Route Instructions are a series of Questions, Jokes, and Gags. Answers to these can be found along the Rally Route; some are very easy, and others may be hard to see or require a good sense of humor.
Question 19 on the Summer Sizzle asked: Guess they like to Ride Shotgun here (Hint: This is just a Shell Game)? At # ________. Having just returned from the Jersey Shore, I was looking for some sign or mailbox made up of seashells. Needless to say, the Rallymasters (Eric and Pat Sjogren) found a mailbox along the route that looked just like a Shotgun Shell. It was very easy to spot; you just needed to understand the tie-in with the question to get it right. The correct Answer was #139, the street address on the Mailbox.
Just after the 3rd instruction of the rally was an easy to answer Question 1: What was founded in 1929? The Answer was The Seeing Eye. You had two opportunities to get the question correct. It was on a Historical Marker and a brass plaque on the brick columns at the National Seeing Eye Institute entrance on Washington Valley Rd in Morristown. Lesson learned – always read the Historical Markers. Only one Team got this wrong; for some reason, their incorrect Answer was “1929”. Maybe they missed the sign or just wrote down the wrong thing. It always makes sense to double-check your answers before you hand in your answer sheet at the end.
Another easy-to-see question was Question 11: Look Quick! What’s the Speed Limit? This is what John Vogt, the Region’s Rally Chair refers to as a ‘Gimmie’ question, something easy to spot to make sure you get at least one question right on the event. It also let the contestants know that the road they were about to travel on was not to be driven at high speeds. Heller Road is one of my favorite Time-Speed-Distance Roads in North Jersey; narrow and twisty and as you progress on the road, doing 15 MPH is a challenge.
One of the many pleasures John brings to the sport is his interest in the historic or oddities seen along the route. At this event, Eric and Pat pointed out Tranquility Farms in Allamuchy, just off of Exit 19 of Route 80. The land associated with Tranquility Farms and almost all of Allamuchy Township was once the ‘Hunting Lodge’ of Peter Stuyvesant. He was a major landowner in New York City and hosted aristocrats like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Jackie Kennedy. To preserve the family chapel on Puffer Rd, just off of Exit 19, the family convinced the Road Department to move the planned roadbed of Interstate 80 by just a couple of hundred feet to its current location. I wonder what that cost the Taxpayers?
A little later along the route, Question 6 asked: What will be locked from Dark until 9 AM? The correct Answer was found on a little sign on the left side of the road, below eye level, at the Tranquility Cemetery, which read, “This Gate will be Locked between Dark and 9 AM”. To get this question correct, you had to reference the ‘Gate’ and not just the Cemetery.
If you are interested in local history, the Allamuchy History Society hosts a bus tour that includes such sites as the Tranquility Cemetery once or twice a year. The cemetery has a headstone carved by Daniel Chester French, who is better known as the sculptor who designed the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, the Chapel on Puffer Rd, and the Allamuchy Freight House/Train Station. Franklin Roosevelt’s station on his way home to Hyde Park, New York, from Washington, DC to visit a “Special Friend” at nearby Rutherfurd Hall, home of Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. (I could go on, but that would be a different story altogether).
Just down the road from the Tranquility Cemetery, while traveling on Route 612/Johnsonburg Road, was the Answer to Question 7: Where can you bury your Oats? At first, I mistook this question as a typo ‘bury’ vs. ‘buy,’ so we jotted down the answer ‘Gibbs Farm,’ which sold Wheat, Oats, and Hay. To our pleasure, about a half-mile down the road on the left was a sign that read “Quaker Burial Ground,” which was the correct Answer. As you may know, Quaker Oats is an American food conglomerate and is now owned by PepsiCo.
The very next question on the rally was Question 8: What’s Famous? This was a very hard-to-see Historical Marker on the left and parallel to the road that read “Famous Milestone.” The Milestone was erected in 1754 to guide travelers on their way to the seat of Sussex County Government at “The Logg Gaol,” which is now known as Johnsonburg.
As the rally started to head toward the finish, we drove up into JENNY JUMP STATE FOREST, home to the UNITED ASTRONOMY CLUBS OF NJ (UACNJ), which offer star gazing to the public on most weekends in the summer.
Two Questions were included in the Route Instructions in honor of the UACNJ; Question 14: What is the first Planet you see? and Question 15: What is the First Star you see? You had to look for these two questions along with two others while traveling up State Park Road to get to Jenny Jump State Forest and the UACNJ. Depending on how competitive you are, looking for four questions at once may be challenging but a good test of your observational skills. The Answer to Question 15 was “SUN” (which is a star) that was very easy to see on a big sign on the right side of the road. While you were relieved to find the Answer to Question 15, it may have distracted you from a sign on the left parallel to the road about 10 feet before the “SUN” sign that was the Answer to Question 14, which read “Mercury.” The Summer Sizzle is part of the 2021 NNJR-PCA Rally Series, so ‘tie-breaker questions’ are important to create competition.
After heading east from the top of the Jenny Jump Mountain, you turned lefton Shades of Death Road, which runs almost seven miles in central Warren County and skirts along Jenny Jump State Park to the west and The Great Meadows on the right. The Great Glaciers carved out the Great Meadows that once covered the area about 21,000 years ago. No questions were asked along Shades of Death Road, so you had some time to enjoy the ride, relax and make up some time after looking for the four questions on State Park Road.
The rally ended up on Cat Swamp Road looking for the last three questions, including Question 25: This House Must have the world’s shortest Telephone Pole? At # ________. The Answer was a converted Transformer Box on a four-foot-high Telephone Pole that was a Mailbox for house # 67, a cute way to end the event.
The rally ended as it began, with a great social gathering at Matter’s Bistro in Allamuchy with a buffet lunch. Like the buffet breakfast at the rally’s start at High Marques Motor Cars, lunch was included in the $50.00 entry fee. The region’s next road rally is on August 15th. Hope to see you there!
Score Sheet wPhotos 
A Unique Score Sheet? 
The Rally Questions 
Summer Sizzle Standings
