Sunday Afternoon, April 26th, 2009. Are you going to be there to make history?
A new chapter is in the making for the Porsche Club of America-Delaware Region and our friends at the Brandywine Motorsports Club. We’ll be joining the Delaware Association for the Blind for the 39th running of the Braille Rally.
What is a Braille Rally? Let’s start out with the Rally part. The modern-day rally is a contest in which cars leave a starting point at a carefully recorded time, and traverse a more or less complicated route to a finish point. Like a bus driver, the rally driver is expected to be on time at checkpoint along the route AND make adjustments along the way to be on time at the end of the rally. The winner is the driver that obeys the directions given by the navigator and makes the least amount of errors. Here’s the Braille part that makes this event unique. Navigators are blind students and adults that will follow the instructions written in Braille. The driver is depending on the navigator to read the instructions correctly, and the navigator is depending on the driver to make the right decision about the instruction! Simple, huh?
Without telling all the details of the route, we’ll kick off from Brandywine Springs Park off of Faulkand Rd and you’ll probably spend about 2 hours driving around the rural parts of Cecil, Chester and New Castle counties. You’ll be ending at the Delaware Association for the Blind’s summer residence – Camp Landis.
At Camp Landis, along with food and drink, we’ll have the award presentation, and also the ever popular Concours, where some of the navigators will choose, by touch, their favorite automobile.
There are four things you’re going to need - your car, an ordinary wrist watch, a clipboard for your navigator to read the Braille instruction, and your time. This is one of our two charity events for the year and it’s the first year that we are taking on the responsibility to run the entire rally. This event is free to everyone who enters and we encourage family participation. We’ll not only need drivers, but checkpoint workers and helpers to serve food and clean up when we’re done for the day. This is an awesome opportunity for our club to reach out to those that may be less fortunate in the community.
Please contact me at braillerally@delawarepca.org to volunteer your time for the Braille Rally on Sunday, April 26th, at 1PM. If you talk to anyone who’s driven in this event over the years, they will tell you that the afternoon is a very rewarding experience.
- Scott Clabaugh
event chair