July 18th marked the end of the Ice Cream Social Distancing Rally (ICSD for short). For those who didn’t participate, the event was a self-guided Rally event where participants navigated between local ice cream shoppes. The event took place on some of our personal favorite driving roads between Middlefield and Madison.
The ICSD was a “Photos and Questions Only” Rally and we utilized RidewithGPS to provide turn by turn navigation for the route. This is the first time that Rally has used RidewithGPS and it seemed to work great. We also provided the printed route instructions for those who wanted to keep it analog.
The event took place over 16 days spanning 3 weekends. This event could be run at any time creating a unique “at your own pace” event which seemed to resonate with the teams. This created its own headaches as photographed items moved and changed. These changes were addressed in the scoring but many of our teams showcased expert sleuthing and were still able to find the correct answers.
Participants were given a set of 12 photos and 14 questions. For each photo, the teams were to find the position where the photo was taken. The team would then write down the next D.O.T. sign on the right hand side of the road. This is how we know that they saw the scene. The questions were more straight forward and were about points of interest along the route. To make things a bit more interesting, the photos and questions were not in order.
The ICSD Rally also incorporated “Selfie” Checkpoints. There were 3 checkpoints along the route. Participants were asked to take a selfie at each checkpoint and include these with their score sheets in order to get the points. We got so many really great photos and the format allowed for only choice weather for this Rally!
We had a really great turnout for this event with 39 teams registering and 78 participants. Since we have taken over the mantle of Rally Co-Chairs, this is the highest attendance of any event. When trying to get the best selfie, many of the teams had the same idea about the face cutouts at the Lyman Orchard Apple Barrel.
For the scoring, questions were worth 2 points, photos were worth 4 points and checkpoints were worth 10 points. We had to throw out 1 question and 1 photo bringing the total possible points to 100. The event was intended to be fun, relaxing and mildly challenging. Below are the “Top 10” results with several ties occurring for 1st and 9th. Very competitive and sharp crowd!
We are so glad everyone was able to come out and join us on the route. We are hard at work on the upcoming Fall Rally. The ICSD Rally has taught us a ton about running remote events and we may be utilizing some of the same practices for future events.
The Fall Rally will take place on September 20 between Colchester and Norwich. We look forward to having everyone join us for the final Rally event for the year. Keep an eye out for a future article in Challenge for further details. See you all in September!