One person's account of the Yarra Ranges Ulysses Car Rally.

brilliant as alwasy.......................snake

Well written yarn cobber. I'll claim the "idiot savant" but not the other one.. You'll keep! Revenge is served cold! ;-)

It seems to only have an option for pointing to an image url (already online.)

I haven't been in a Ulysses car rally before, in fact I can't recall being in any car rally, but I managed to convince my wife Jean that it would be a productive way to pass an unusually mild winter Sunday.

The Suzuki Swift was a natural choice for a car rally, but upon hearing that it wasn't a race we opted for ze boring comfort of ze German engineerink. Attempting to navigate the 2 km from our home to Mooroolbark tennis club I turned the wrong way on Cambridge Rd, which didn't exactly augur well.

At the tennis club the now famous brains trust of Fonzie and Crofty had set up an official looking desk where they took team entries and dispensed pieces of paper with weird heiroglyphics on them that were (to people who remembered their glasses) instructions and puzzles.

At some point we picked up a hitchhiker in the form of Kelvin Blair. I'd heard that Kelvin has recently bought an amazing new caravan, the Gromad 6, with all the bells and whistles. What I didn't know is that he had to sell all his cars to afford it and then realised he had nothing to tow it with. So we confidently entered an elite team of three, with me driving, Jean navigating and Kelvin doubling as tail end Charlie and back seat driver.

There was an option to gamble by taking on either a 10 point bonus puzzle or a 20 point bonus puzzle with the catch being that if you got it wrong you were docked 10 or 20 points respectively. As the old 'Punter to Punter' radio show used to say, 'We're not encouraging you to gamble, we're just encouraging you to bet!' We decided that with our elite intellects it was a sure thing and went for the 20 point puzzle. This was a long, clumsy paragraph that apparently had something unusual about it that we had to discern. 'Written by an idiot', we all rapidly concluded, but then quickly realised there was nothing unusual about that. We decided to chew it over at the morning tea break and headed out onto the road. There were perhaps a dozen teams, some only two people strong, who left in staggered starts.

There were lots of nice easy clues and Kelvin's local knowledge stood us in good stead for a while. Then we breezed past the Elephant Rock unexpectedly, which Kelvin cleverly pointed out. I thought we should do it 'by the book' and kept going, but after a kilometre of discussion it was decided that maybe we were being tricked so we did a u-turn and went back. Trying to make up for wasted time we took a quick snap of the Ulysses logo graffitied onto the rock (to help the local police presumably) and resumed our course. Along the way we stopped to take photos of all manner of exotic fauna as instructed, unaware of the fact that only one photo was necessary or counted.

After a nice country drive through some scenic roads we ended up at a friendly little hotel somewhere out near Upper Beaconsfield (I think), where we enjoyed morning tea and biscuits. After another read of the 20 point brain teaser Jean realised it had no 'definite articles' in it, or at least maybe not. We Googled 'definite articles', mostly because I'd never heard of any such thing, and concluded that she may or may not be absolutely right. I then noticed that it also had no apostrophes in it. Finally Jean suggested that maybe some letter wasn't being used and sure enough, durrr Fred, th-r- was not an - to be found.

At this point our confidence was somewhat dented by Placid, when he asked how many of the bonus items we had photographed at Elephant Rock. Looking at the instructions more carefully we saw that yes, there was indeed an 's' on the end of the word 'item'. 'Oh, most of them,' we replied. Dang it!

Another brain teaser worth bonus points was a picture of a triangle with lines that broke it up into numerous smaller triangles. The question was how many triangles in total. I kept on getting to 20 and then realised I'd run out of fingers and toes. It was starting to blow my mind, but with a Herculean effort I managed to count 32, or it could have been 34. I informed Jean, who told me that she had counted at least 45. That was deflating, but after a few more goes we got to up around 50 and decided to settle on that, feeling pretty chuffed about it. 'I could only count 55', declared Placid, casually bursting our bubble.

I'm still convinced we could have got all 64 of them eventually if one of Fonzie's relatives hadn't illegally thrown in an unofficial brain teaser, something along the lines of, 'A man used to be 25 but now he's 28 divided by the eigen vector of pi squared... so what colour is his pet gerbil if it's a Monday?' As you might imagine, this did no favours to anyone trying to juggle a mental hatful of triangles.

At some point we realised that everyone had already left and this nearly ended up costing us lunch, especially as we had to keep stopping on the way back for redundant photos of fauna. 'Is a horse a fauna?' someone would ask and we'd come to a screeching halt.

Suddenly on the left Elephant Rock appeared again, this time when the instructions said it would. Buoyed by Placid's accidental tipoff we managed to take shots of all eight vandalised sections of the landmark.

The final clue took us to the Macca's next to Brunch, where we found the forlorn shapes of Homer and Brin shivering on an outside table. 'Get thee back to the tennis club', they commanded us. We discovered that one, or maybe even two, poor teams were still out in the wilderness behind us.

Back at the tennis club Fast Eddie was barbecuing the last batch of sausages and hamburgers and the officials were tallying up the scores in a somewhat haphazard way. I was interested to see how much we'd won by, but in an unbelievable scoring injustice normally reserved for professional boxing, we didn't even make the top three. Did we even get our bonus points? What about my shot of a dead fauna with its gizzards hanging out?

As you all know, if Yarra Ranges branch was a village and there was a vote for village idiot, Rowan would be right up there in the running. Well it turns out he is an idiot savant! The team of Rowan and Gib took out first place and then Rowan reprised it by being the first to answer a trivia question about the Canary Islands being named from the Latin 'canus' meaning dog. Well strike me pink. Genius comes in many shapes...

In second place were the awesome foursome of Sue, Cheryl, Stewie and Terry and third place was snaffled by a team of Sheryl, Mark and Glen. June and Greg were last by such an impressive margin that they were also presented with a handsome prize.

Placid (aka Tony Garner) absolutely caned all the other trivia questions and brain teasers, despite his IQ these days having dropped to only 175.

It should perhaps be mentioned that the (probably) highest scoring team had not yet arrived back, but too bad, the prizes had been awarded and money and wine distributed and drunk.

A good time was had by all and many thanks must go again to club stalwarts John Eckhart, Mick Crofts, Eddie Veith (chef), Eduard Kuppens, Brinley Cottle and the MC, Gavin Martin (aka Snake) I think some of Fonzie's family also helped out and no doubt others, so please add below any other names who deserve our thanks. A lot of time and effort went into the planning of this event and it is greatly appreciated.

Anyone know of a good doctor who does brain transplants?