VT: Great American Mountain Rally Revival 2021

Across the last four years, a new autumn tradition has been put in place for Lynn and me. In October of 2018, we entered our 1948 Hudson Commodore in the Inaugural running of the Great American Mountain Rally Revival (GAMRR). The “revival” is a resurrection of the original Great American Mountain Rally series, run Thanksgiving weekend from 1953 through 1957. Those initial rallies lured international driver and navigator teams to the mountains of New England and New York. 

That first year our Commodore carried Lynn and me, through the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont, to a second-place finish among the “Original Class” (1957 and earlier, i.e., cars that would have existed at the time of the original rallies) cars.

GAMRR 2019 took us through New York’s Adirondack Mountains, but brake problems on Day 3 kept us, and our 1952 Hudson Hornet Club Coupe, from finishing the second running of the revival. Indeed all of the rally’s Original Class cars failed to finish the rally for one reason or another.  

Like most non-essential events during the 2020 calendar year, the running of the GAMRR fell victim to the COVID-19 Pandemic. It was a frustrating reality that left us looking to 2021 with new enthusiasm.  

A flashback to August 8th of 1997 – my parents had come to Maineville, Ohio, to join us in celebrating my Dad’s 71st birthday. My dad met and fell in love with my mom through the letters she sent across the Atlantic Ocean during the years he served during WWII. It wasn’t until Dad returned home to Ohio that he met Mom face-to-face. Ironically, during those early courting years, Dad developed a second love. It was somewhat by accident that he stumbled onto the all-new 1948 “step-down” Hudson automobiles. Dad needed something reliable to carry him each weekend from his house in Toledo to Mom’s doorstep at her University of Cincinnati dormitory. His 1948 Hudson Super-Six was the first of five step-downs that he and Mom owned. Without a doubt, the Hudson years were the absolute zenith of Dad’s automotive life. 

On that 71st birthday in 1997, Lynn and I surprised my parents with the gift of a 1951 Hudson Pacemaker. The new Hudson took them on a 45-year time tunnel journey into their past. Ultimately, the car introduced them to a whole new circle of friends through the Hudson-Essex-Terraplane Club.  

It was a bittersweet moment during the summer of 2019 when the Pacemaker came home to Maineville. We lost Dad in July that year, and today he abides in our hearts and joins us on all of our Hudson adventures. As we registered this year, we felt it was appropriate for Dad’s 1951 Hudson Pacemaker to carry us throughout our GAMRR 2021 journey.  

We fired up the Pacemaker early on the morning of September 11th and set out to the north on I-71. Our target that day was Utica, New York. We arrived at the Utica Red Roof Inn just after dark. It had been a beautifully cool and clear September day, and the Pacemaker chewed up 622 miles like a champion.  

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Sunday provided for repeats of two of my absolute favorite drive routes. Our morning offered an opportunity to drive north from Utica on St Rt 8 through little towns and villages like Poland, Speculator, and Pottersville. It is a winding route that takes you through the southern entrance into the Adirondack Park, along countless lakes, streams, and rivers. Our target for lunch was the town of Schroon Lake and the Pitkins Restaurant.

Schroon Lake is the wonderful Adirondack town that we’ve visited essentially every other year for the past 30+ years with our friends/family, the Lewis’. Founded in 1907, Pitkins Restaurant, they’ve been feeding the people of Schroon Lake for more than 100 years! Serving classic Americana cuisine at all three meals, Pitkins is a cornerstone of our past Adirondack experiences.

Knowing that the restaurant had changed ownership since we last visited, we were a bit nervous about what we would find. The physical face of the restaurant has seen significant and positive change, but the menu has largely remained very loyal to the Pitkins tradition. In short, they didn’t fix what “wasn’t broken.” Perhaps best of all, the new owner somehow convinced the previous owner, Marie, to stick around to prepare all the wonderful Pitkins pies. I enjoyed a Paradox Panini sandwich and a slice of coconut cream for my lunch!

From Schroon Lake, the Pacemaker eagerly carried us off to the northeast, past Paradox, Ironville, and into the village of Crown Point, where we crossed Lake Champlain and into Vermont via the beautiful Crown Point Bridge.  

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Here on the western side of Vermont, we were entreated to the second scenic wonderland of our day. We drove along through a landscape dominated by gently rolling hills and beautiful dairy farms. Gazing off to the west brings views across Lake Champlain and onto the Adirondack High Peaks in New York. Turn to the east, and the horizon is home to Vermont’s Green Mountain range. More settled than the Adirondack wilderness we had just toured, western Vermont provides a true storybook setting that one is reluctant to leave behind.  

By 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, we had made our way into Stowe, Vermont, and located the Trapp Family Lodge, home for the next four days.  

The story of Georg von Trapp, his wife Maria, and their nine children gained worldwide notoriety by way of The Sound of Music, the classic movie. In 1938 the von Trapp family fled their native Austria, leaving family, friends, and their personal belongings behind. They made a life for themselves as the Trapp Family Singers and toured six months out of the year in more than 30 countries. In 1941 Georg von Trapp purchased a farm on the mountaintop property in Stowe and established the Trapp Family Lodge. The family found the setting reminiscent of their native Austria. 

After they retired as the Trapp Family Singers, they began welcoming friends from around the world to the Trapp Family Lodge. Still, to this day, members of the von Trapp family work with the Lodge to welcome visitors during all seasons of the year.  

GAMRR 2021: Day 1

The first meeting of the rally teams was 9:00 am on Monday, September 13. Teams checked in and collected the rally attire for both our bodies and our automobiles. We were able to reconnect with the teams we knew from the 2018 and 2019 GAMRR events and make acquaintance with some of the new teams. I went out quickly to get the Pacemaker fitted with the GAMRR 2021 door stickers.

At 10:00 am, we came back together. Gary Hamilton, the man whose heart and mind originally hatched the notion of a revival of the Great American Mountain Rally, worked with John Buffum to finalize this year’s final route. Gary introduced John to us as a rally veteran and Vermont resident who knows the roads. The prescribed path for this year’s GAMRR promised to take us back to the Green Mountains with a romp through the Champlain Valley thrown in for good measure. The bulk of our time together provided an introduction to Competitor – Richta GPS Checkpoints, an App new to many of us that was to be used to assess each rally team’s performance throughout the rally.  

The GAMRR is a Time, Speed, Distance rally in which participants are given a list of Numbered Route Instructions that define the day’s path. There are prescribed Regularity Sections throughout during portions of that path, which teams are given specific average speed instructions to follow. Rally organizers know precisely how long a car should take to complete any given Regularity Section if their prescribed directions are followed perfectly. A penalty point is assessed for every second a car arrives at a checkpoint, either early or late, from that perfect arrival time. In the end, the team with the lowest number of penalty points wins! 

During the initial two runnings of the GAMRR, each Regularity Section was staffed by a Rally Official who physically clocked in the time when each car passed any given checkpoint. This year each team carried a personal cell phone to which the new Competitor – Richta GPS Checkpoints had been loaded. The app provides GPS tracking of each car. As a car enters a timed Regularity Section, the phone emits a ring tone. Likewise, as each car stumbles onto the end of any given Regularity Section, the phone again emits a ring tone. Immediate feedback is provided to each team to know how early or late to the exit checkpoint.  

We learned at the morning meeting that while the original lineup of cars included 19 entrants, that number had been trimmed to sixteen following three last-minute cancellations. Cars were numbered this year based on the year of manufacture.  

Following our hour of Rally School and Richta Competitor training, teams were given time for a lunch break and to get cars gassed up in advance of a short afternoon rally session that provided literal hands-on training using the use of the new Richta-based format.

Our performance in the Day 1 afternoon trial rally session was scored by the Richta Competitor system, but its results would not be included in the final tally by which end results would be judged. Day 1 results were for educational purposes only, and then the slate was cleared for the genuine start of the rally on Day 2.  

It was good for Lynn and me that our scores did not count. It had been two years since we had any rally experience, and it showed. At one point, we missed a turn during a timed Regularity Section. There is a Time Allowance feature within the Richta Competitor software that allows teams to claim a fudge factor to correct for things that would keep you from staying on time. Lynn and I tried to estimate how much time our missed turn cost us and entered it in as a Time Allowance, but we still ended up with a maximum error penalty of 120 points on that Regularity Section. In other words, we were more than two minutes off the ideal time despite our use of the Time Allowance feature.  

That evening we spent time reviewing the day’s route instructions and came up with a list of four or five pearls that we would attempt to put in place for the Day 2 adventures the following day.  

Dinner was at the Trapp Bierhall brewery.

GAMRR 2021: Day 2

We were up early in the morning. I went down to check fluid levels on the car and get the morning’s coat of dew wiped away from the windows. The Day 2 Route Instructions were to be passed out at the 7:00 am breakfast. Driver’s Meeting was at 8:00 am. As Navigator, Lynn stayed back in our room at the lodge and camped out with the day’s Route Instructions. At the Driver’s Meeting, I got our Richta Competitor up and registered for the day, and I listened in on last-minute details. Cars were set to go off at 9:00 am, plus the car number. As Car #1, we would be first off at 9:01 am.

We walked down to the car with a nervous energy about us. We hadn’t done well during the previous day’s trial run. We finished that two-hour session feeling somewhat spent, and we knew we were now walking into the teeth of a rally day that would not bring us back to the Trapp Family Lodge until roughly 4:15 pm.  

We were off as planned at 9:01 am. Our Route Instructions took us away from Stowe on St Rt 108 north. The instructions also informed us that the first 70 miles of the day’s route were identical to the rally teams’ route during the 1955 Great American Mountain Rally!  

Headed north on Rt 108, we quickly saw signs reminding us that we were headed directly toward Vermont’s legendary “Smuggler’s Notch. Smuggler’s Notch is a narrow mountain pass separating Mount Mansfield, the highest peak in the Green Mountains, from Spruce Peak. During the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the Embargo Act of 1807 was passed. The act forbade trade between the US and Canada or Great Britain. It was Jefferson’s effort to keep America out of the Napoleonic Wars, and the act created significant hardship for many Vermonters. With the Canadian border so close, there continued to be goods and livestock that were “smuggled” through the mountain notch and south into the heartland of Vermont. Documentation shows that fugitive slaves were known to use the notch as a Canada-bound escape route. Improvements were made to the automotive roadway through Smuggler’s Notch in 1922. These developments eased the flow of liquor out of Canada during America’s Prohibition years.  

We had passed through Smuggler’s Notch in our Hudson Commodore at the close of Day 1 of the 2018 GAMRR. From either direction, Rt 108 goes from a flat two-lane highway with a divided centerline to a tortuous, narrower two lanes without centerline, to ultimately a single lane through the notch’s tightest squeeze. It was apparent in making our mountain ascent toward the notch that the Pacemaker’s small flat-head six-cylinder engine lacked the horsepower to maintain ideal speeds. It was a reality that impacted us throughout the mountainous sections of the entire rally.  

I only wish that Lynn and I had performed as flawlessly as the Pacemaker did that morning. We missed a turn that had been marked as the path to the birthplace of Chester A. Arthur. It occurred during a timed Regularity Section and ensured a poor score on that section. It was a beautifully cool and sunny day as we drove north and ultimately west into the beautiful Champlain Valley. The route took us out onto a series of Vermont islands within the body of northern Lake Champlain. Lynn and I recognized Isle La Motte from a previous trip we had made years ago when we went in search of the grave of American Civil War physician Dr. Melvin Hyde. I had met Dr. Hyde through his war-era letters that had been discovered and bound in book format by Geraldine Chittick, a direct descendant of Dr. Hyde and my cousin’s mother-in-law.  But the rally clock strictly prohibited any notions of looking once again for Hyde’s resting spot.  

We were a full half-hour behind time by the time we pulled into Knight Point State Park for our mid-day lunch break. It felt so very good to get out of the car for a stretch, a bathroom break, and to enjoy the lovely box lunches the Trapp Family Lodge had prepared for us.  

Lunch proved to be just the tonic we needed. Our bellies were full, our minds were cleared, and we had ample time to be in place for our 1:21 pm departure time. The route took us off the islands and back to the east above the city of Burlington. We turned south through Jericho and Richmond, where we turned once again to the east and ran alongside the Winooski River toward Waterbury.  

We turned north across the bridge at Waterbury and completed the day’s final leg to the north and back to our Trapp Family Lodge home. We finished the day’s route somewhat buoyed up in observing that our scores through the day’s second half Regularity Sections showed considerable improvement over our morning times.  

For dinner, the group was called together at the Trapp Bierhall to review the day’s events and see where we all stacked up in the penalty point count. Our direct competition was with Wayne Dix and his 17-year-old daughter, Bronwyn. They were rallying in the only other Original Class car, the 1954 Chrysler New Yorker. The score sheet showed that we were just over 300 points behind team Dix. It seemed that young Bronwyn had done a better job adapting to the new Richta technology and was doing an admirable job navigating her father throughout the day’s route.

After dinner, Lynn and I went for Vermont maple ice cream cones, a seemingly literal effort to lick our Day 2 wounds.  

Going to bed at the end of Day 2 was very reminiscent of bedtime on Day 2 of the GAMRR from 2019.  On both occasions, the weather forecast for Day 3 called for soaking rains.  

GAMRR 2021: Day 3

In 2019 the forecast had been spot-on accurate. It was a miserable all-day rain, and our rear brakes failed that day, taking us out of the rally. Day 3 of 2021, however, dawned with a bit of hope. The morning radar map showed the heaviest rains had gone north of us in Canada. Furthermore, we were going to be heading south and east early that day, away from the rain. We were up early again. Lynn had the day’s Route Instructions at 7:00 am.

When I went down to check on the car early on Day 3, I found a dense cloud cover but no rain. The Driver’s Meeting was once again scheduled for 8:00 am, with our Car #1 departure time set for 9:01 am.  

On Day 2, our early pass through Smuggler’s Gap was really the only test of the Pacemaker in a mountainous setting. I knew from the Driver’s Meeting that it was going to change for Day 3.

On schedule, we set out from Trapp Family Lodge heading south on St. Rt. 100 toward Waterbury. Amidst a gentle rain, we were running the finish of Day 2’s route in reverse. But at Waterbury, we continued on to the south. Turning off of Rt 100 to the east on Moretown Mountain Rd, we entered a portion of our journey that followed the 1956 GAMR. That historic pathway carried us all the way through our Day 3 lunch stop. By the time we hit Northfield Falls, the rain had stopped entirely. We picked up Rt 12 and then 12A, running west toward Roxbury.  

It was here in Roxbury where we turned west on Warren Mountain Road. 

A bit of a historic aside…

Dr. Joseph Warren, a martyr hero of the American Revolution, died at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. Warren was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts.  

In 1781, just six years following the death of Dr. Warren, the aforementioned town of Roxbury, Vermont, was chartered. As a further tribute, the neighboring town of Warren was chartered in 1780 and named for the martyred physician. The neighboring peak became Warren Mountain. Back in Ohio, we live in Warren County, another piece of American geography serving as a tribute to Dr. Joseph Warren.   

It did not escape my attention as we passed through Roxbury and turned onto Warren Mountain Road. Indeed it was an awareness that warmed my heart and made me smile. It was like finding a piece of home in Vermont. That peaceful calm, however, was about to change. Quickly Warren Mountain Road became a winding and steady ascent. Just as we had noticed the previous day at Smuggler’s Notch, the Pacemaker, while able to climb the mountains of New England, could not maintain normal pace. Once we had safely reached the mountain’s summit, my concerns became the opposite. How were we going to keep the car’s speed under control as we descended Warren Mountain on the other side?  

On modern cars, drivers are able to shift the transmission down and allow the engine and transmission to assist in the effort to control speed on a mountain descent. The Pacemaker, however, is fitted with a 70-year-old overdrive transmission. The upside to the overdrive is that it gives the car taller gears, allowing it to travel at modern highway speeds. The downside to overdrive is that during downhill descents, the car will be in “free-wheeling” mode. The engine and transmission provide zero assistance in maintaining the pace of the car. 

Aware of the free-wheeling concerns, I reached beneath the dashboard and flipped off an electrical switch that disengaged the overdrive function before we began our Warren Mountain descent. Almost immediately, I could tell the car was still in free-wheeling mode. No matter what gear I put the car in, it was rolling freely down the mountain road with only the brakes to control our pace. In hindsight, perhaps I should have brought the car to a full stop while the brakes were fresh and cool. But I didn’t. I did my best to stay off the brakes, pumping them in advance of corners and staying off of them when I could. One of the problems on unfamiliar roads is that one doesn’t know how close you are to the bottom. A short distance in front of us was John Buffum in his little red Mazda 3. He was out patrolling the course to see how the field was dealing with the challenges of the route. There came the point where our pace demanded that I get on the brakes harder than I wanted to. Within a matter of a minute or two, we could smell the overheated brakes. My anxiety built as I realized that the effectiveness of the brakes was diminishing with extended use. We had reached a point where bringing the car to a complete stop was NOT an option. We had gained on John Buffum to the extent that he, too, could smell our brakes. He sped off ahead of us to stay out of our path. We came to a corner with a suggested speed of 25 miles per hour, and we were easily near twice that number. Where would we have been had the rain not quit? We, in effect, had no brakes. But thanks be to God, after that final tight corner, the road made a gentle curve to the left and opened up in front of us into a straight and subtle continued descent. There were no cars in front of us. I was able to totally stay off the brakes, shut the engine down and simply coast until the car came to a stop at the roadside, in a grassy meadow, at the mountain’s base. John drove up to check on us, and he soon was followed by other rally teams on their one-minute cycles. We waved them on and sat still and allowed the trustworthy Pacemaker’s brakes to cool. We had encountered a somewhat less dramatic experience with the Commodore during our pass over the Lincoln Gap in 2018. In each case with both cars, the brakes functioned as normal as soon as they had time to cool. 

Back on the road, we entered a short Regularity Section that went well. We turned south on St. Rt. 100, and then made an immediate right on Lincoln Gap Rd. Wait just a minute here! I looked at my Navigator and said, “Did you just say, turn right on Lincoln Gap Rd.? 

Ah yes, Vermont’s fabled Lincoln Gap! The Lincoln Gap road connects the Mad River Valley and the town of Warren on the east with the Champlain Valley and the town of Lincoln on the west. It is the highest vehicle-accessible mountain pass in the state of Vermont. Mostly paved, it is a steep, narrow, twisty path that poses a challenge for vehicles of any era. 

As I mentioned earlier, we traversed the Lincoln Gap during the 2018 GAMRR in our 1948 Hudson Commodore and experienced overheated brake fade woes. Having just experienced a brake failure problem on Warren Mountain Road, I knew we simply had to figure out how to eliminate the Pacemaker’s free-wheeling behavior, or we were NOT going up the Lincoln Gap.  

The Hudson overdrive transmission is set up to be engaged or disengaged in one of two ways. There is an electronic switch and there is a mechanical sliding plunger. Push in the plunger and overdrive is engaged. Pull out the plunger and the overdrive is disengaged. At Warren Mountain, I had turned the overdrive off using the electronic switch. We learned the hard way that it did not eliminate the overdrive’s free-wheeling impact on the Pacemaker. As we turned onto the Lincoln Gap Rd, I came to a complete stop, reached down, and pulled out the mechanical overdrive plunger.  And then we set out across the Lincoln Gap Rd. Even before we hit the ascent, I could tell immediately that if I took my foot off the accelerator, the engine remained engaged; there was engine drag on the car that served to slow the car. In short, we were good to go! I could be confident that once we had made our way to the summit of the Lincoln Gap Rd, we’d have both brakes and the engine/transmission to help us maintain a comfortable speed for our descent. And that’s exactly how it unfolded. Make no mistake, it is work for car and driver both getting up and down that mountain pass. Indeed as we approached the Lincoln Gap summit, we came up on Wayne and Bronwyn Dix sitting at the side of the road with an overheated 1954 Chrysler. But for us, the potentially catastrophic outcome that we encountered on Warren Mountain was avoided at the Lincoln Gap through that simple mechanical plunger beneath the dash. Whew!!  

While we remained on the 1956 GAMR route straight through our lunch break, our travels were somewhat anti-climactic relative to our Warren Mountain – Lincoln Gap adventures. All of the rally teams witnessed that both Original Class cars had encountered problems through the mountains that morning. Everyone was happy to see both the Hudson and the Chrysler roll into the Jiffy Mart that had been designated for our Day 3 lunch break.  

Following lunch, we continued north along Rt 7. Beyond Monkton Boro, we cut off to the east and entered into a Regularity Section on which we had to follow a segment from a vintage county map. We made one wrong turn but quickly figured out our error and got back on track.  

There was one final Regularity Section through the heart of the Sugarbush and Mad River ski region. There came the point where we were not able to maintain the prescribed average speed because we were uphill in the mountains. Team Dix, in their 1954 Chrysler, was gaining on us from the rear. By 1954 the Chrysler had been fitted with the early version of the Chrysler V-8 HEMI engine. Wayne Dix was having no problems with the ascent. Not wanting to hold Wayne up in the middle of a timed section, I waved him on around us, and off they went. A mile or two up the road, we had been able to make up some of our lost time and found ourselves within spitting distance of the Chrysler. We came to a tricky intersection at which multiple dirt roads came together. My Navigator was on top of it! Young Bronwyn errantly sent her father straight through the intersection while Lynn had me headed off to the right. We were in front of the Chrysler once again. And somehow, that felt good. We had been the first car out of the lot that morning. We should be the first car back at day’s end!  

Heading off to the north, the skies opened up with a heavy downpour, the first rain we had seen since early morning. We rejoined the very same Rt 100 upon which we had started our day. Running our route in reverse, the rains quit, and we found our way back to the Trapp Family Lodge.  We had completed the 2021 GAMRR!  It was 3:15 pm.  

We completed the 2018 GAMRR in the Commodore, but brake problems on Day 3 kept us from finishing the 2019 GAMRR. It is amazing how much better it feels when you’ve struggled through those three challenging days to return to the lot as a finisher! We got to experience that again this year.

An Awards Banquet was planned upstairs in the Mozart Room at the Trapp Family Lodge for 7:00 pm. Wandering back from the Hudson, we headed for our room, collapsed in bed, and took a two-hour nap.  

We arrived at the banquet knowing that we had done better than we had on Day 2, but clearly, our two-day score was considerably higher than Wayne and Bronwyn Dix’s in their 1954 Chrysler. We were going to finish second in the Original Car Class.  

During the awards ceremony, it came as no surprise to learn that Driver Tim Winkler and Navigator Ralph Beckman, with their 1973 Mercury Capri, were the Overall Champions of the 2021 GAMRR. Their total penalty points for the rally were 18! We, by comparison, finished with a total of 894 penalty points. Tim had hoped to run the rally in a vintage Saab that he is having restored, yet it wasn’t finished in time. The Capri was a borrowed car he was driving for the first time.

And Ralph Beckman, quite simply, is one of the most accomplished rally navigators in American rally history.

A noticeable absence from the Awards Banquet was John Buffum, the local Vermont guy to whom Gary Hamilton had relied upon to lay out the course for the 2021 GAMRR. We were told that John had a family event that kept him from being with us. That was sad because all of the rally teams felt a sincere sense of debt to John for the mix of challenge and fulfillment we had enjoyed over the previous three days. On the other hand, John not in the room allowed Gary and Ralph Beckman to talk about John.  

Ralph, who began his rally career in the 1960s, spoke of his connection with John Buffum initially in a Michigan-based rally called the Press On Regardless Rally, America’s oldest, having been run each year since 1949. Ralph spoke of how Richard Petty is the finest NASCAR driver ever.  AJ Foyt, he said, is America’s finest open-wheel, Indianapolis driver, “John Buffum”, he told us, “quite simply is the finest American rally driver ever.” Across his storied career, John won 11 national titles and 117 national championship events. He was the Babe Ruth of American rally racing.

Toward the end of the Awards Banquet, two things happened that were very special.  

Ed Owen, driver and owner of the #8 car, the handsome red 1972 Lancia Fulvia, one of the guys who has participated in all three of these Great American Mountain Rally Revivals, stood up to make a presentation. He and David Geisinger, another of the team drivers, had pooled their resources for an online rally auction and acquired the signed #52 number plate from a car that the great Stirling Moss had driven in the 1954 Great American Mountain Rally. They knew that Gary Hamilton, our GAMRR Rallymaster over each of these revival rallies, has become quite a historian of those original 1953-1957 GAMRs. They knew that Gary had been aware of the auction for this original Stirling Moss number plate. He had voiced past curiosity about who had ended up as the high bidder. Well, Gary found out that Ed and David had been the high-bidders as they presented him with the number plate as a token of their appreciation for all he’s done to coordinate these rallies. Gary was highly moved with emotion. Heck, we all were.

At the last minute, Gary remembered that he had forgotten one piece of business. When Ralph Beckman talked about the Press On Regardless Rally, Gary was supposed to have made a presentation. They had acquired two copies of a recently published book detailing the Press on Regardless history. Each book has been signed by both John Buffum (who wrote the book’s Foreword) and Ralph Beckman. Gary explained that they wanted to present the two books to two of this year’s rally teams who had best demonstrated the “Press On Regardless” spirit. He went on to talk about the rally’s two Original Class cars and the genuine challenges of putting cars that are 70 years old through a challenge of this type. He spoke of the brake problems we encountered, and he spoke of Wayne and Bronwyn being sidelined as they crossed the Lincoln Gap with over-heating woes. He then called us up and presented the two Original Car Class teams with the books. What fun and a special surprise!

The next morning we said our “Good-Byes” and loaded the Pacemaker to begin our trip home. These are always ambivalent times, somewhat like the day after Christmas.  

Our target that Saturday, the first day of the return trip, was Erie, Pennsylvania. That would put us two-thirds of the way home. We enjoyed a return romp across the Crown Point Bridge into New York and Schroon Lake, where we enjoyed lunch for a second time at Pitkin’s before heading south through the Adirondacks and westward through New York and onto Erie. The Pacemaker ate up the miles as if it too was proud of what it had accomplished.  

At 3:32 pm the next day, we rolled onto Ascot Drive, home from the GAMRR 2021. From start to finish, door to door, the Pacemaker had tracked 2,162.8 miles.

From the RReNews Clan — Thank you to Greg Davis for sharing this enjoyable read. We felt we were “along for the ride” as they were going through the mountains! Below is Greg’s collection of many fellow competitors.