First full day – recon

We all arrived safely in Ensenada on Monday late afternoon. Tim, Dennis, Mark, Tom and Brooke about 1 hour after us. By 430 the Jeep was out of the trailer and parked … and everything was offloaded. It looks like it survived the drive without concern.

While some worked on the Jeep, a few of us went shopping … we are staying in 3 houses … Fulton, #76 and #14 … weird, one name, two numbers. None of the houses have hot water, although that was remedied today … and none seem to have heat.

We started today with a fine Brooke breakfast, the value of having a cook on an adventure is truly immeasurable <bg>. We put a chase radio into the rental car and headed out to spot a couple of places, this is where we will be pitting and changing drivers/co-drivers.

We left at 10A and got back around 530P … about 220 miles today. We came across multiple other racers doing the same as us … and many pre-running (this is when they run the course in advance).

Seems that most people we came across had some sort of car issues … we weren’t excused either … turns out our rental car had no oil, which meant some scavenging … and eventually finding 2 liters in what can loosely be described as a “village”.

Our final destination was the pit area at Borrego, Tim and Brooke discussed the location of North … we watched a few racers go by … and we pretended to be a pit crew … it’s hard to imagine that a place in the desert 2 hrs from anything will be transformed into a small town of over 5000 people on Friday.

We did a little pre-running of our own … well, Tim convinced Mark to use the rental car … to be fair, not much convincing was required … and I think they had taken the optional insurance <g> … never, ever buy a ex-rental car.

We’re back at “race central” (our unheated, but now with hot water houses) … dinner’s being cooked and we got a fire going … tomorrow is another day.