There are not too many places in this world that this old country boy would live other than Tennessee, but i like Flagstaff. Mountains, big lodge pole pine trees, and a great town! It is beautiful there!

We stayed the night at “Little America” hotel. Theresa and i were tired. We are tired every night! It seems every hotel is the same and night only lasts just a couple of hours….but two more rally days!

It was cold leaving Flagstaff. The car never really warmed up doing the speedo run. We were fast, fast, then slow. I left the speedo alone and decided to run with it. It didn’t take long for the temp to get really Hot outside. We did a maze just right after we went on the clock. No problem!

We did a pitstop at Grand Canyon Caverns. They planned for us to tour the caverns so we had about an hour and a half off. It was a nice relief from the 115 degrees to be 210 feet below ground. Remember what the temp is underground? Always constant 57 degrees. It was cool. Temperaturistically.

We left the caverns headed toward Kingman on a winding two lane desert road. A big dump truck pulling a trailer passed about 30 seconds before we were to go on the clock. Ready, three, two, MARK… We were on our way. Yep you guessed it, we caught the truck on the next big hill doing 35 when we were holding 55 mph. Double line, curve, hill, and one car behind him. She asked me if I could see, to which I answered “sort of”. Didn’t lose a single mph or second! Thats all I will say about that!

A funny thing happened to our friends from Alabama in the 1916 Hudson Hillclimber. Jeff Stumb and Robert Dinges were rallying well whena gust of sideways 115 degree wind yanked the instructions right out of Robert’s hands. He started yelling at Jeff to stop, jumped out, ran back hollering at Jeff to mark the clock. He retrieved his “wayward” instructions and got back on the road. Not knowing exactly how long they were not moving they estimated 30 seconds and corrected….and got a 2 second on that leg!

Immediately after lunch we climbed some mountain to 7000 feet at 25 mph. I have to tell you that a bunch of cars got “atmospheric” as Uncle Bob calls it when the car gets hot. I was watching the temp gauge carefully an got up to 210 F but never boiled over. We turned a corner on the top of the mtn to see four or five big huge deer standing in the road. We climbed the mountain and went back down. Our friends Ty and Pam Holmquist were in contention to move up to first but broke on the mtn. They dnf’d (did not finish) and we got a 2 second leg!

We transited to Golden Valley en route to Laughlin and air conditioning! We did another monster maze and performed flawlessly until the last left turn, we held 20 and should have been 15. We realized it a little late but did correct some just before the last check point. Got a 10 second on that leg alone, for a total for the day of only 15 seconds. We placed sixth I believe with one ace. Cameron and Greg got an Ace and a pretty good score too.

We stayed at the Colorado Belle casino. One more day! Theresa pulled position 57 for the last championship day and the last rally day. We are ready! Running at the back of the pack but ready!

We’ll see now won’t we!

From the road,

Corky Coker

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