{"id":399,"date":"2006-06-28T22:35:49","date_gmt":"2006-06-28T21:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.com\/skodarallyblog\/?p=399"},"modified":"2009-06-16T16:48:35","modified_gmt":"2009-06-16T15:48:35","slug":"essex-charity-stages-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/?p=399","title":{"rendered":"Essex Charity Stages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend will see our furthest-away event, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wickfordautoclub.co.uk\/Charity\/current.html\">Essex Charity Stages<\/a> &#8211; not an event I&#8217;ve been to before.  It offers 45 miles of stages for ?165, which compares very well to most multi-venue events, but that&#8217;s because it uses farm tracks and disused airfields, rather than mind-meltingly expensive Forestry Commission tracks.<\/p>\n<p>Being a navigator has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would.  With one exception, and that was today.  I had to get us some accomodation, and spent a fruitless hour on the Internet and phone trying to find us somewhere within a decent distance of the event, and finally did.  I hate using the phone, so making 20 pointless phone calls wasn&#8217;t a great way to spend half the morning.  So I spent the rest of it fixing the car (various little things here and there, nothing major), and making sure it&#8217;s all OK.  So far, so good.<\/p>\n<p>But there are a few challenges this weekend.  Firstly, it&#8217;s my first multi-venue event navigating, which should be OK, but I have NO IDEA what the road books, etc, will be like &#8211; usually you get the road book (which tells you where to go throughout the day) by post, so you can peruse it before the event (or in Paul&#8217;s case, ignore it completely!), but we&#8217;ll be getting this when we sign on, probably around 8am on Sunday morning.  So no time to plan anything else.  And the paperwork I&#8217;ve had so far looked, well, let&#8217;s say it was a bit sparse, and leave it at that.<\/p>\n<p>Next problem &#8211; there are two service areas.  This is something that always causes me a problem, because we don&#8217;t ever have a service crew.  So what we do is leave the Pajero in the service area with all the stuff (OK, a toolbox and some spare wheels) in it.  But when you have two service areas, you can&#8217;t do that.  Well, you can, but if you need something and you&#8217;re at one and it&#8217;s at the other, you&#8217;re stuffed.  This happened on Newton Abbot stages last year, but luckily there was no drama.  So we&#8217;ll have to be uber-careful to not need anything at Service 2.  And carry a couple of spare wheels and a few choice things in the toolbag of doom in the back of the car.  What I really need for occasions like this is Sport Billy&#8217;s bag.  That would do nicely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This weekend will see our furthest-away event, the Essex Charity Stages &#8211; not an event I&#8217;ve been to before. It offers 45 miles of stages for ?165, which compares very well to most multi-venue events, but that&#8217;s because it uses farm tracks and disused airfields, rather than mind-meltingly expensive Forestry Commission tracks. Being a navigator [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rallies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":611,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skodarallyblog.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}