The Rally!
This year's theme was "Olympic Challenge" since the locale was fairly close to Park City and Salt Lake city, venues of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Our "venue" was not exactly a pristine snow-covered ski slope in the middle of winter, it was a somewhat soggy cow pasture, riddled with "Texas Frisbees" and other assorted land mines in the middle of summer. But the weather was perfect, warm and dry and, as usual, the Sportsmobile people did an excellent job of organization and preparation. Breakfast and dinner were catered by "Fat City" out of Moab and the food was excellent and plentiful.
Part of the organizing committee, Diane, Liz and Lynn.
For Olympic Competition purposes, each "van" was assigned to a team with four other vans. The idea was to accumulate points during the Rally in hopes of winning some really great prizes. The members of the winning team each received a set of five brand new BF Goodrich All-Terrain TA's, so people took this seriously (or semi-seriously anyway).
Here is our excellent team from left to right: John, Janet, me, Lorri, Jeff, Kay Annette, Elaine (and cat), Ben, JoAnn and Duncan. We had a great time over the course of the four days. meeting most days at breakfast and dinner to discuss our progress and strategies. We're standing in front of Jeff's rig, getting ready to head out on the Road Rally.
Here we are again (without Elaine) standing in front of the bridge to "Competition Island", the area of the cow pasture set aside for the 4WD Olympic events. As far as I know, no one was voted off the island.
Early morning and late afternoon rides were available aboard a "powered parachute". It looked like fun, sort of.
This shows our "home" for the four night duration.
On the left is Kay, Jeff. Elaine and Ben and on the right is Jeff with the Turtle Expedition rig in the background.
The meeting and eating area was a big top tent. Here we with some of our team members planning our next moves over a few bottles of pre-dinner wine.