Pre-Race Day 2: Prepping the Car (and the crew)
At breakfast this morning, Kevin received all the decals and the plates that we needed to make the car ready for the race. After some finagling (and brief annoyance between Kevin, Silas, and me-- as we found we couldn't cover our Massachusetts plates and found that there was a technique to peel-and-stick decals), the car was ready for the basic safety inspection.
Our 6-cylinder, '65 red mustang automatic convertible, which first arrived at the house four years ago, is now ready for its first ever week of heavy driving (our longest drive was 200 miles prior to this trip).
As the two drivers dealt with the safety inspection and the race documents, Joice, Grandpa Bennett, and I piled into the car to go to Fontainebleau to find a laundromat. (It was the closest one within 10 km that wasn't in Paris that we knew was open today. It seems that most stores are closed on Mondays in France.) It took Joice the full 30 mins it took to run the washing machine, and we wandered around the town for the remaining 36 mins it took to dry our clothes.
Joice and Grandpa swapped for Silas, Drew, and Kevin for our next run. In packing the car (and shipping it), a few things seem to have come up missing: our socket wrenches (which we never packed), and our set of keys (luckily, we packed spares). So off we went to the local hardware store, which is conveniently located next to the supermarket. No day is a bad day when it consists of going to a supermarket with a lot of variety AND a hardware store (if it wasn't obvious, before Uniqlo, Home Depot was once upon a time, my favorite store to go to).
By far, this was one of my favorite supermarkets because it was like a super-sized target store AND had a hardware store attachment!
After lunch, the boys and Joice headed over to the race briefing as Grandpa went to go look at the cars, and I sat in the hotel room working on homework. After the briefing, Silas and Kevin went to calibrate the car rally computer, found a bug with the accelerator pedal reader to the computer (the grounding wire crimp was loose-- luckily, the race mechanics soldered the wire for us), and headed off to the big gala dinner at the Chateau where the race starts tomorrow morning.
And they're off to their wonderful dinner with the other competitors!
Driving starts tomorrow....