O Rally?

Stef suggested we go for a drive in her 2 door Mini Cooper. In the parking lot, we slipped into her bucket seats. I took over from there. At nearly 40 miles an hour, we zipped up to that windy edge known to some as "Mill Creek", a secluded town running the ridge of Bellevue and Bothell, where she then proceeded to pump her vehicle in and out of turns, sometimes dropping down to 24 miles per hour only to immediately gun it back up to 34 again, fast, slow, fast-fast slow, sometimes a left turn, sometimes a right one. She preferred the righter ones, the sharp controlled jerks, swinging left to right, before driving back to the right, only so we could do it all over again, until after enough PAUSEs and enough MBCUs and more travel sickness than I'd been prepared to expect, taking me to parts of this city I rarely think of and never visit, we dipped down into some slower offshoot, a lane of lightless coves, not stopping there either, but pushing further on until she finally found the secluded pizza place we'd been heading for all along, overlooking the city, far from anyone.

That's right. Stef popped my rally cherry on Friday night. She driving, me desperately trying decipher navigational instructions like "L at 'Paradise'", "L at T (ELLIOT)" and "R at STOP ITIS PAUSE 30". We came in second of three teams in our bracket — Novice, of course — and had a final time of 486 seconds, inclusive of the 300-second penalty given to us for getting a wee bit lost on a dark and unassuming back road off of Broadway Ave. Total rally distance was roughly 64 miles.

Vroom. (And sincerest apologies to Z.)