Friday, July 20, 2012

After leaving Illinois Thursday morning, the skies were clear and blue. Packed into the vans, we headed out on stage four of the race which begin along the famed Route 66. The pavement was flat and open, and it seemed like another great day to be on the road. As we moved on and into Wisconsin though, the race route became considerably more challenging. Traffic picked up, clouds blew over, and the long straight aways we became accustomed to in the morning gradually became hilly and increasingly congested. Despite our best efforts to maintain a steady battery voltage, we begin to drain the pack. Eventually when we met up with the highway where the route was taking us, a tough decision had to be made of whether to keep pushing forward, or stop and risk not making the checkpoint and stage stop. We pulled off the race route with hopes of building back some battery voltage before hitting the highway, but the weather quickly turned sour. What little sunshine there was near the entrance to the highway was gone almost instantly and so it was agreed that our best alternative was to trailer yet another leg of the race, to La Crosse, Wisconsin.