Author: Jim

Without clear directions, what do you expect to happen?

Emily Miller and Wendy Fisher (109) are representing the U.S. at the Rally Eaicha des Gazelles (“Gazelles” for short) in Morocco, which you can track in real time here. All-female teams (except for those two guys who crashed it), and they navigate with compasses and 50 year old maps. As if that isn’t hard enough, here were the instructions the teams got this morning:

“We wanted to test something: we are going to give you your roadbooks, but they are… blank! But your route is already marked on your map for the day; the checkpoints are already plotted. The relief is shown as usual; the scale is the same as usual (1:100 000). The difference is that today’s map has no grid lines. We have erased all geographic coordinates and the latitude and longitude scales! You will have only heading and distance to work with. To do that, you only need to know your North, which is given by the line on the left of the map, framing the map legend (which is not in its usual place).”

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!11!! No. Seriously.

For crying out loud, we race a 41-year-old VW Beetle off road in Mexico and the  car carries three GPS units, a satellite phone, an SMS-type satellite communications uplink and my iPhone. I’d wire it for cable if the rules let me.

Emily, Wendy and all the racers have my greatest respect. Here’s their blog and Twitter feed.

T-minus 8 hours and counting til we leave for Prairie City. I expect word any minute that the engine is in and tested. Annnnnnny minute.