Chapter 7: The 2018 Texas Gambler 500
The inaugural Texas Gambler 500 was Busty’s first official event. Mazdeuce made a great writeup of it here, but I’ll share a brief summary as well.
Friday we arrived late as usual after some last minute prep and packing. It was cold and drizzly all weekend, but thankfully Mazdeuce made us these sweet shifts with Busty’s profile on them. I slept in the back of the car for the night.
Saturday started with an off-road course at Rally Ready. We didn’t really know what to expect going into it but Busty made the track look easy. Thankfully we were at the front of the line, because there were probably 100 cars in line and it was slow going because everybody was stopped any time someone got stuck.
After the off-road course, we headed out of Rally Ready to hit the day’s checkpoints. What we weren’t expecting was that the checkpoints weren’t necessarily POIs, but mostly waypoints just to guide us to take a certain route. With that context, the gps coordinates that pointed to the middle of a field or a random telephone pole made more sense, but we were pretty confused at first. It was a long day, but we did all of Saturday’s checkpoints.
Sunday started with another route of checkpoints. We looked ahead and decided to cut off two of the stops in order to get back to Rally Ready in time to do the off-road course. Back at the Rally Ranch, they had a new course mapped out through the woods. Again it was slow going with the whole gaggle of gamblers making their way through, and again Busty made it look easy. We ended up having enough time to run through the course multiple times so that everyone got a turn behind the wheel.
We didn’t stick around for the awards ceremony since we were all fairly cold and tired, but overall it was a good time and we spent some nice road miles touring the Texas hill country.
