Our group met in the designated area (an Autozone parking lot in Weymouth, MA) between 10:30 and 11AM on Sunday morning, and we had a brief driver’s/navigator’s meeting before shoving off on our trek, one at a time, spaced every five minutes.

Rallyemasters Peter and Carole Marino once again provided us with a scenic, fun, and challenging tour of Boston’s South Shore. Challenging in the sense that, once again, all of the participants got lost for various amounts of time, coming up on other rallyists stopped and scratching their heads, and often passing each other in the same and/or opposite direction, to the delight and amusement of all concerned. The original five-minute spacing quickly became moot. The Alfa leaving out second arrived at the destination first, the car leaving third arrived about twenty minutes later, and the rest (including the car that left first) arrived in a bunch a half hour after that.

But did we hear any complaints? Hardly. The whole idea was to have a bunch of fun, and that’s exactly what we did. The route took us along a variety of roads—twisty tree-lined vias, long straightaways, oceanfront byways, quaint seaside villages (okay, and an occasional long traffic light). Our directions made us rely on our odometers to find the correct turns. (One gutsy couple arrived in a Spider whose odometer had stopped working four days before, so they (for the most part) tagged along behind another Spider; another car’s trip odometer broke while being zeroed at the start of the rallye.) Along the way, we were required to write down the answers to questions about various points of interest (required, that is, if one were interested in scoring well when the points were totaled).

Eventually, everyone arrived at the rallye’s destination: AONE President Tom Lesko’s house in Hingham. Well, almost everyone. Peter Marino later received the following email:

Oops—Rich and Melanie, AROCT members, had joined us for the Rallye. Sorry, folks—hope you join us again sometime soon! Anyway, the rest of us proceeded to enjoy a cookout comprising traditional summer fare—hot dogs, hamburgers, salads, and the like—while Peter tallied up the rallye results. Using a scoring system that no one completely understood (but based loosely on the time it took to complete the route, the distance traveled, and the number of questions answered correctly), the winners were determined. Tied for first place (with each team receiving an AONE polo shirt) were the teams of John and Mary Torello (who joined us from Connecticut driving a ’63 Giulia Spider) and Tom Letourneau and his spunky nine-year-old granddaughter Emily (in Tom’s ’77 Corvette, because all of Tom’s running Alfas have roofs, and Emily likes cars with no top). Tied for second place (with each team receiving an AONE umbrella) were John and Betsy Clarke (recently transplanted to New England from Michigan) and the Pratt brothers (nothing good to say about them). In third place (receiving an AONE coffee mug) were Michael Johnston and Steven Cox in a beautiful ‘94 green/tan Spider CE with 14,000 miles (they probably added more miles doing the rallye than they had hoped to).