2008 New England Forrest
ahh, rally maine. my favote rally from 2007 and a great showing again for 2008. i went up this year with ryan again, and also joining us was my maria, satanpez steve, shindaddy rich, and philthmonger. we all took off work on thursday and friday and PACKED into steve’s hyundai hatchback and ryan’s mom’s altima. its about an 8 hour drive and we had all day so we tried to take our time, but that proved futile as steve and rich tried to break the speed of sound in vehicles not meant to go past 60mph.
Entire photo album:
2008 New England Forrest Rally
Click the image to view the whole story if you are on the home page
the journey begins on thursday. maria and i pack our crap into my hyundai and go meet up at steve’s house and pack up his hyundai. we discovered that there really isn’t enough room in a hatchback accent for 3 people and all their camping gear. we shed some of the useless crap back into my car and take off for ryan’s apartment across town. we meet up with the others there, make a stop at the quickstop for some road drinks and snacks and start heading north.
Collection of “transiting” pictures
what i basically stared at for 8 hours, the back of ryan’s car and my ancient t20 laptop with a gps receiver hooked to street & trips
here’s looking at us:
and somewhere in vermont steve proved that an accent can in fact do 100mph.
we make it to maine without event, find out campsite, set up our tent city, find a 1 gas station store with hot dogs, and another gas station store with hot dog buns. we cooked them up over the fire, and called it a night. big day tomorrow.
Friday:
We got up bright and early and headed over to mexico for breakfast. there is this pizza place just outside of the main town that has great breakfast so we stopped there again this year and had some.
here is us after we finished eating.
then we headed over to the mexico rec park in anticipation for the jump. we didn’t really know that there was a short stage before this one that we could have spectated over by our campsite, along with the expose at sunday river.
Collection of pictures from the Mexico rec park stage
we had a bunch of time to kill so we checked out the service and steve climbed this pole.
i FINALLY got a good look under the hyundai. i’ve been told its an entire evo drivetrain but i’ve never seen it in person.
sure looks like it to me.
we met up with kenny bartram and dennis hotson. they just bougt matt iorio’s subaru that prior tuesday and were racing it this weekend. dennis said this car had significantly more power, stiffer chassis and 500lbs lighter. awesome.
then some guy brought over some electric dirtbike and kenny started doing wheelies on it. pretty funny. he was trying to race dave mirra on the other eletric bike, and they stopped to pose for pictures and i snuck one in.
i’m not sure exactly what was going on here but steve decided to get freaking with this weird lion’s head
we also had to obtain our tickets for teh bus ride to the 2nd spectator spot of the day. there was limited seating so we had to make sure we got our tickets. the town provides 2 busses that take you to and from the 2nd spectator area, its totally worth it. if you ever go to this rally GET THE TICKETS.
we made our way back to the jump and the cars came around once for a practice pass, and then they came around a second time for a real stage.
this year most of the cars were laaaame over the jump. just 2 good ones.
going to the moooooon brb!
there are tons of pictures of the cars going over the jump, check them out in the galler. click on the one above and it brings you to that point in my gallery.
after all the cars made it through the track, we had to wait a few hours for the busses to pick us up. we went over to walmart and got some food and a game of horse balls, or ladder balls, or whatever they are called. its actually a pretty fun game.
the bus eventually came and we all piled in. philth makes faces as i try and take a picture inside the bus:
we get off the bus and walk about 1/2 mile up the road to the same spectator spot we had last year. i nice uphill sweeping right turn. we set up camp and maria was too afraid of ticks to join us so she wandered aimlessly and eventually settled in across the street.
while trying to find a place to take a leak, i found a dead body at the bottom of a ravine. right next to it were a pair of work gloves. awesome
here is a link to all the pictures of the cars coming through this stage:
http://gtluke.smugmug.com/gallery/5466974_6urGR
highlights:
when this stage was over we walked back to the bus and took that back to where we left our cars. we packed up our junk and headed over to the brewery near sunday river for dinner. the menu changed a lot since last year and honestly none of us enjoyed our time there. i distinctly remember last year having great food and a great time. oh well.
we finished our meal and headed back to camp, bought a few bundles of wood and sat around the fire. good times
saturday:
we wake up bright and early again and head over into new hampshire for the first stage of the day:
this was an interesting stage. we had a stadium type view of the back lot of a paper mill. the locals were serving breakfast which was great since we didn’t have time to get any. i had a pretty good ham egg and cheese sandwich. serving that sandwich without taylor ham should be a crime though. it was filling none the less.
we hung and out watched 2 stages here.
highlights:
(click the image above to see the whole dillon-success album
i’d like to find out who this photographer is and get him this picture. its great
oh man on the way back when travis got caught up in the turn and wasted about 7 seconds, the irish mob next to us went NUTS. jumping up and down and screaming. i’m pretty sure they came out to see mcshea win, or were with his team. i didn’t get any pictures of that.
coming back:
pfft i don’t need tires.
around this time is when my camera started acting funny. the last stage of the day before i really got a lot of dirt in my camera. i was shaking the camera upside down every time a car would pass to get the dirt off of it. i was covered, my camera was covered, and dirt and dust really packed itself into my lens. i ruined my lens last year at maine but it didn’t materialize until the following week when i was on vacation in balitmore. bummer! even worse now is that i have another stage to go after this one, which happens to be the coolest stage and my camera isn’t working properly.
i have a nikon 18-200vr lens which is a really wide range of zoom, causing the lens to move a LOT during different zooms. this makes for a lot of places for dirt to get. the ultimate result of this is that i lost my autofocus.
so, from here on out i’m doing my focus by hand. its HARD to do. i pulled all the tricks i could out of my ass to try and still capture good images, some came out usable thankfully.
okay so after that stage was coming to an end we decided to leave a bit early to miss the mad rush to the next stage. we headed back into maine, and this time it was pretty far out there in maine, i think it was about an 80 mile drive too. we were greated by some fellow rally enthusiasts on the way over to the next stage. it was really cool being surrounded by these guys for so long just cruising for like an hour to the next stage.
we arrived at the next stage too late to make the first bus so we hiked about 1/4 mile into the woods to a pretty crappy spectator spot. after the cars passed once and i didn’t bother to take any pictures (too much tree coverage) rich and i decided to try and see if we could catch a bus between stages. we hiked back down, and found a line for another bus. we made it on the bus (just BARELY enough room for us) and took that about 3 or 4 miles into the stage where they dropped us off. as long as we were careful up there nobody cared really where we were standing so i was able again to get close to some awesome rally action and get some great shots. too bad my camera was half broken or i would really have been able to get some killer shots again. oh well.
check out the full album of this stage here:
highlights:
here’s rich waiting for cars. we could hear the crowd behind us cheering some guy on who had climbed nearly to the top of one of those huge pine trees. the drunkards in the crowd were trying to throw him up some beer since he finished the one he brought with him. haha.
check out how dark the forest is, its CRAZY up there. you can NOT walk through the forest because its so dark and dense.
cars!
damn i wish my autofocus would work
after the cars came through, we had a break until they came back out. rich and i decided to hike to the other side of the spectator spot to get a better angle from the other direction. we didn’t want the marshals to see us so we tried to hike through the woods. holy crap was it impossible! these woods are DENSE.
here’s rich looking like some kind of jewish outdoor terrorist
we finally emerged out of the woods and found a couple perched on top of some rocks on the inside of a turn. we joined them and they turned out to be really cool. we enjoyed our time with them.
cars coming through:
the bushes were really getting in the way of my shots so between cars (2 min) i was running down to the road to try and clear them from my angles.
rich thought it would be funny to take pics of me doing so
after all the cars came through rich and i started to hike down the road back to the spectator spot where our friends were. we figured it would be shorter if we walked the 3 miles than if we waited for multiple bus trips. but we got about 1/3 of the way down and the bus stopped and picked us up! standing room only but hell it was a free ride back down. awesome!
we all packed our crap back into the cars and we took off for the closing ceremony. we got there, a bit late but we did see a bit of the action and got to check out some of the cars again.
we left the ceremony area and went and got some dinner at a restaurant/pub on the way out of sunday river. they offered a lobster stew which was REALLY good. i really liked it a lot. the rest of the food and the service was good. hopefully i can remember the name of this place and take note of it so others can enjoy it.
we left dinner and went back to camp. we got a few more bundles of wood and hung out for the night. phil decided to throw one of my diet barq’s into the camp fire which promptly exploded into a HUGE root beer hot mess. pretty funny though, but i really could have gone for another barq’s on the way home haha.
sunday morning we get up, pack up and leave but not before taking a picture in front of this sign in front of the campsite.
we had lobster on our minds and ryan found a great spot for us to go. it was some buffet place near the shoreline. (again, i need to get the name of this place for everyone). lunch buffet was $12 i think, and we got a WHOLE lobster (1.5lbs) for $8 more! the place was interesting too, as it was a converted school.
after lunch we found a go cart place and i promptly kicked everyone’s ass by an entire lap. i’m in the red
w00t!
a few more hours in the car and eventually we convinced everyone to stop at cabella’s to check out the camping supplies and guns. we spent like 45 minutes there while poor phil waited in the car.
few more hours home and maria had some kind of pee attack and we had to pull off the highway really fast and run into the palisades park mall so she could relieve herself. haha it was a funny episode but we lost the other guys in the process. about another hour and we were home. maria and i had to pack our stuff out of steve’s car and put it in mine, then drive to my house and unpack again. i think i got to bed at like 1am and had to be in new york city at a sewer treatment plant by 7am for a system start up. uggg that week was rough.
thats the end of the NEFR story. please remember to look through the photo albums as there are hundreds of pictures. and they are for sale with reasonable prices. even though my broken lens should be under warrantee (its back at the nikon plant right now) any sales would be appreciated 
Tags: rally