Sunday morning. Up bright and early. The sun’s shining brilliantly, just a couple of puffy clouds in the sky. A leisurely breakfast, al fresco. Around 10AM, a red ’72 GTV2000 pulls up the driveway – it’s my brother John. Spouse Vi and I hop into my yellow ’74 Spider, and we caravan south for the start of the South Shore Road Rallye.

We arrive at the designated spot (the Autozone Parking lot in Weymouth, MA) a little early. Pete Marino and his wife Carole are there to greet us, having roped off a section of the lot exclusively for rallye participants. One by one, more Alfas appear. Some familiar faces, some new friends. All the Alfas look pretty spiffed up. Nice assortment too, including Spiders from each of four separate decades, GTV, GTV6, Milano … ten Alfas in all.

What about the Shelby Dodges, you ask? Uh, they never showed. Think we intimidated ‘em?

Have time to chat with the other Alfisti. Get to ogle some cars we’d seen before and some we hadn’t. Sell a few polo shirts and coffee mugs out of the trunk of my car.

The drivers’ meeting. Pete hands us our rallye instructions – a couple of pages explaining how things worked and several of the directions themselves. We’re already grinning and scratching our heads. Pete goes over the guidelines with us, we ask a few questions, and we prepare to shove off.

Here’s how it works: The cars leave at five-minute intervals. You start with a calibration stretch that allows you to calibrate your odometer to a known distance. Then the actual rallye starts, with instructions like "3.7 bear right" meaning to bear right at an intersection 3.7 miles into the rallye, or "23.4 light, left" meaning that at 23.4 miles into the rallye you should come to a traffic light and take a left. Interspersed with the instructions are questions about things you observe along the way. The scoring is based on how your total distance compares with the actually rallye route distance, how your total time compares with the predicted route time, and how many of the questions (there were 28 of them!) you answer correctly. It’s apparent that two people are required in order to function at all – a driver (of course) and a navigator.

And we’re off. Pete decides to send us off in order of vintage, oldest first, so Rod Burdick and Dottie Williston head out in Rod’s ’65 Giulia, followed by brother John with AONE President Tom Lesko navigating in John’s ’72 GTV, followed by Vi and me in Old Yeller. I don’t know the order after that, but my feeling is that the order-of-vintage rule got discarded somewhere along the way.

We zero our trip odometer at the starting line and zoom off to the cheers of the onlookers (well, that may have been my imagination). Pull up square in front of the Taylor Rental sign that marks the end of the 1.2-mile calibration leg – I’m reading 1.0. Well, looks like we gotta do a little compensating along the way. No problem – Vi was a math major.

We zero the odo again and head off on the rallye. "0.2 right", no problem. "0.5 right", no problem. "1.0 left", uh, that was a dead-end street. Retrace and take the next left. Looks better. Then we pull up next to brother John and Tom Lesko, who started five minutes ahead of us but are now parked at the side of the road studying the instructions. Hmmm – this rallye could take a little longer than we thought. What’s more, John and Tom report that they’d already been passed by Rod Burdick – headed in the opposite direction!

We head our separate ways to fend for ourselves. After a couple more wrong turns it’s obvious that either we’re not very well calibrated or Peter Marino is a devious monster. Finally, we’re back on track and decide to zero the odo again and just add that factor back in. We drive for a little bit and I notice that the odo hasn’t started indicating yet. Ah-ha! That’s right! It does take a little time before Alfa trip odometers start to register after you zero them! So probably none of us are calibrated! Cool!

We start to use the main odometer and not apply our 1.0/1.2 calibration factor, subtracting its reading from the mileage in the instructions. Works pretty well. Then I spot Andy Kress’s Milano Verde in my rear-view mirror. Hmmm – there were a lot of Alfas newer than mine and older than his in the pack. We must have really lost a lot of time with all of our botched turns, and his trip odometer must not have the same problem as mine. Nah, turns out that he was sent out right behind us. Whew.

Things are going a little better, and we’re having a very enjoyable ride around the South Shore roads. We’re not even having too much difficulty with the questions we’re hit with, such as "7.9 Question: What is the name of the brook you are about to cross?", "17.2 Question: The ugliest American vehicle is sold here. What is it?". (Hint: It was a Pontiac dealership.) Still, there are times when we have to stop and study, and I pull into at least another couple of cul-de-sacs before finding the right road. The most amusing part is encountering Alfa after Alfa, sometimes in the same direction, sometimes in the opposite, sometimes parked – cars that were supposed to have been spaced five minutes apart!

At about 25 miles into the rallye, our route takes us to the Scituate Lighthouse, a very scenic spot where we have to get out and wander around the grounds in order to answer several questions about its history. It’s a pleasant break at a lovely seaside location.

Then back in the car. As we’re driving off the peninsula where the lighthouse is scituated, we pass Denise Schoener and Jack Joyce in Denise’s red GTV6 – big salutes! Realizing that we’re now probably way behind our schedule, I seek out stretches of road where we can, uh, make up a little lost time. On one long straight section, I pull out to pass a slower-moving vehicle, gather some significant velocity, look up in my rear-view mirror – and there’s Andy Kress’s gray Milano right on my tail! Andy has a big grin on his face and his wife Joan is wearing a somewhat different expression.

Our route takes us through a couple of South Shore towns and then we break toward the coast for a drive along the ultra-scenic Jerusalem Road for a few miles. Problem is, everyone is enjoying the view so much that no one is paying much attention to the rallye instructions, and we’re quickly back in the mode of taking wrong turns, backtracking, running into other Alfas in similar situations, and finally taking one of the wrong turns that turned out to be the right turn. (My math major subtracts 47.4 from 48.8 and gets 0.4, but I’m not mad, dear, really, I’m not mad.)

At one point, our rallyemaster directs us to pull into a foreign used car lot and identify the four cars in the showroom (a Ferrari 308, two Jag E-Types, and a Lancia Flaminia). When Andy Kress and I are about to leave, my goofball brother (who was ahead of us but missed the turn because he and Tom Lesko were gabbing) shows up and blocks us in while they get out to look in the showroom. No problem, though – I hop in his GTV and drive it down to the end of the parking lot, hop back into my Spider, and almost get away with his keys before he grabs them from me.

Home stretch. We wend our way through a couple more towns, answer a few more questions, guess right and wrong about a few more turns, and finally make our way back to the Autozone parking lot where we had started. Pete’s there to log us in and record our time and distance. While we wait for the others to arrive, we have a great time comparing notes, laughing about our many various screw-ups, and condemning the Marinos (good-naturedly, of course) for the ordeal they’d put us through. Condemnation is the rallyemaster’s lot in life.

Well, uh, not everybody makes it back. The newest Alfa had to retire with electrical problems (well, and a very young navigator who may not have been up to the demanding rigors). And another team, whose names we shall benevolently leave undisclosed, simply didn’t show up, although we’ll learn later that they did ultimately complete the entire course and had a great time doing it.

Once we’re gathered, we all go up to Pete and Carole Marino’s house a couple of miles away, where they’d prepared a terrific barbecue – hotdogs, hamburgers, sausages, salads – a summer feast! We gab more about the great fun we just had. How about the time that Andy was stopped at an intersection not knowing which way to go, and Tom and John pulled up behind him and both pointed off to the right, in which direction Andy headed when the light changed, while Tom and John continued on straight, the correct route. (There’s a score left to be settled here.)

In the meantime, Pete tallies up the scores for all the rallye participants, taking into account our times, distances, and observational acuity. Though none of us can understand exactly how or why, the winners are:

• First Place: Denise Schoener and Jack Joyce win a great 1/18th (?) scale model of a red GTA

• Second Place: Rod Burdick and Dottie Williston win a bucket of Meguiars car care products

• Third Place: Dave and Vi Pratt win one o’ them high-tech scooters like all the kids have

• Fourth Place: John Pratt and Tom Lesko win a racing video (which Tom inherited since John doesn’t own a VCR yet)

We hang out for a while and eventually disperse, having had a thoroughly enjoyable day. On the way out, we actually get to see a Shelby Dodge that showed up sometime during the festivities in the driveway. We say our goodbyes and head back north, content in the knowledge that we know all of the turns between here and home.

Would I do a road rallye again? In a flash! Let’s do more of these!