I had a bad feeling about Mr Sanetrik's rally when the end of the Odo leg was on a road which, by the rules in his general instructions, did not exist. His reaction when I pointed this out was "Oh, details." Well,
yes details. A course rally is supposed to be an exercise in precise interpretation of the instructions after all, and by that criterion the rally was not runnable from the get-go, since the endpoint for the Odo leg did not exist. His protestations at the start that we should "not overthink" the instructions seem, in retrospect, to have been another way of saying "I haven't given them a lot of thought, so neither should you."
Pasha and I did bite what I assume to be the intentional trap on Leg#2. Running on 652, working on:
31. Left.
32. Left at 258.
33. Right at 651.
You came to a crossroad with 644, which you were ONTO from a long way back. Correct logic seems to have been:
1) We can't do the NRI to go Left, since that would not take us off our Main Route, which is 644 because we are ONTO it.
2) We can't use this MRD to turn here, because it is ambiguous (644 goes both right and left)
3) So continue down the priorities to "go straightest".
If you get all this right, you go on to a "Y" where you execute the NRI 31 at 692 which tees out at US258, where you do NRI 32 and go on to 651 and do NRI 33.
If you bite the trap and execute NRI 31 at the crossroad, you come to a "T" with 637 and do a Right . I'll bet Mr. Sanetrik thought he had cleverly looped the trap, because 637 also tees out on US258 north of 651, so you if you follow it the instructions work and you may even think you are on course until you get to the next checkpoint.
But oh yes, there was another "detail": going along 637, before you get to US258 you come to a "Y" where 644 goes to the left. You cannot execute NRI 32 here, so you must leave the intersection on your "Main Road" which by the Main Road Determinant rules is 644. This also tees out on US258, but
south of 651. So you do NRI 32 and go less than a mile and again by MRD take 644 going off to the right. In fact, 644 goes all the way to Zuni on US460, and you won't find any route 651, but you
can use the 6.6-mile callback to be sure you are lost before you get all the way to Zuni. At this point, we thought about going to the midpoint and doing a restart. But oh, there was another "detail": if you were off course you had no way to
find the midpoint.
So we made our best decision of the day: we went home. We had used our free-rally coupon to pay for the event, so I guess we got what we paid for, huh? Oh, and one more "detail": I doubt I will be signing up for any more of Mr. Sanetrik's rallys.
