Bringing On the Heat

When it was as hot as it was on Saturday in East County, toppling record highs, it’s much more than a casual temptation to stay inside. So when my friend Debra had confirmed that the First Annual Car Rally of Del Cerro Baptist Church was still on, we decided to brave wilting in the sun. We would be with friends, after all, in an air-conditioned truck, thanks to her husband, Jim, who would do all the driving.

About 50 of us church members met at 4:00 in the sanctuary where Minister of Music Paul Plunk, the one who’d dreamed up the car rally idea, gave us a stack of envelopes with clues and the general directions to the rally. Destination unknown to us all.

We all piled into the truck—me, Debra, Jim and another friend, Mark. But we barely got out of the parking lot, stumped on the first clue that entailed the letters on a keyboard. Jim had the hardest job of driving while the three of us yelled out questions and a myriad of directions to him. I drove everyone in the car crazy with my singing entire hymns out loud; I had to come up with the names of the hymns by way of a line or two given of the song on the clue sheet. The only way I could figure it out was to sing the entire hymn all the way through. When that failed, I googled lines of hymns. A near impossibility as Jim swerved and turned radically, according to directions-by-the-minute from the passengers.

By the time I figured out half the hymns, I was cross-eyed from all the paging through the hymnal, googling and scribbling answers on the clue sheet. We’d already made a stop at Engine No. 3 at the Railroad Depot Museum in La Mesa. We’d also made a stop at Yogurt Mill—without buying the chocolate yogurt suggested in the directions, difficult to ignore, in 100+ degrees. We wet our lips with gulps from our water bottles and charged ahead.

The hymn singing and unscrambling ensued until finally we all figured out our next stop was Mount Helix Amphitheater. The HeART event was just beginning there, so we had to skirt the mountain and look for Rivera Drive, hot on the tails of the two cars ahead of us.

“Well, if we’re not going to be first place, then maybe we’ll be last. They’ll probably give a prize to the last,” I said.

Everyone groaned good-naturedly. Debra said we all should have gone to the Padres game; she’d given up her tickets for the Car Rally.

The sun was starting to slide down behind the mountains in the back country while we weaved back and forth in and out of Rancho San Diego and rural El Cajon.

Okay, here’s a Bible trivia question,” Mark said. “Who knows the answer from in Judges 14:14?”

I scrambled to the page, found it. It was Samson’s famous riddle, not long before he lost his famous locks of hair to the hands of Delilah, and not long after that, his life.

“Honey!” I yelled.

At that, Jim swerved onto Honey Truck Trail.

"Pretty out here,” I murmured, staring out at the rolling hills colored golden by the setting sun. “Where are we?”

“Way out in Jamul somewhere,” Jim said.

“Okay, now for the address we’re going to,” Debra said, pen poised in hand, clue sheet in the other. “How old did a Hebrew boy have to be before circumcision?”

Oh, I knew that one. Has to do with Vitamin K. The boy had to be a certain number of days old to ensure the blood would clot. “Eight days!” I blurted out.

"And on what day was man created on?….”

“The sixth day!”

Then Debra instructed us to look for 13 mailboxes.

Jim nodded. We all got to talking about food again. We were so hot and hungry for the chocolate yogurt we’d skipped out on.

“Hey, are you counting?” Debra asked.

“What--you mean we got to keep track of every single box?” Jim said.

Must be in a cluster, we all agreed, woozy. We whizzed up the winding road, noted that the address numbers were several blocks past where we were supposed to be.

Jim pulled left into a driveway, backed out and turned around. We’d all seen the mailbox cluster a little ways back, but had been so bleary-eyed from sun and sweat we ignored them.

“Gotta be it,” Jim said, as we all counted 13 mail boxes the way kindergarteners would.

Up the dirt road we jounced along feeling like fools when we saw the stick figures of our fellow rally competitors walking around up on the hill above us. When we finally parked behind the row of dirt-caked vehicles, Paul and Karen Plunk were standing there, grinning, waiting for us.

It was the new home of one of our church member couples, way out in the back country of Jamul.  

“So how many miles did you go?” Paul asked, peeking in at Jim’s odometer. “43 miles, huh? You get lost somewhere?” He grinned.

“So are we last?” I asked, almost pleading.

Karen shrugged. “Everybody come on inside, get something to drink and eat,” she said.

Two hours later, when the sun had set and all of us Car Rally participants were seated in the dining room, the family room, or on the patio, eating pulled pork, baked beans, potato salad, green salad and drinking water like it was going out of style, the front door opened.

In dragged our friends Jill and Brian and Becky. Jim, Debra, Mark and I hadn’t been last in the Rally after all. Nope.

But I say our crew should have won for all the fun we had, including the playful bickering, furrowing of brows, the hair-pulling (of our own hair, not each other’s), and just plain dogged determination.     Thank God we all got to eat and drink and laugh together, all 50 of us, many of whom never really knew each other before. That’s why Paul Plunk had dreamed up the Car Rally in the first place.

After we’d eaten and drunk our share of the bounty offered by our gracious hosts Glenn and Cheryl, Paul had us gather out on the back patio. He told us all that he’d wanted to see the middle-age group of the church enjoy much more fellowship and fun together.

“You guys do the bulk of the ministry and work at the church. You are all involved in some way, and besides that, you have your work and family,” said Paul. Both he and Karen are in that 35- to 60 age group.

So, besides seeing each other on Sundays and Wednesday nights, there isn’t a lot of time to hang out and get to know each other outside of our usual little cliques, Paul explained.

Yeah, it’s true. I’ve always wanted to get to know Mark and Melanie and Phil and Barbie a little better, for instance. Phil and Barbie’s crew, by the way, with Curtis and Kelly, won first place. And that was a minor miracle, seeing as how Barbie suffers from motion sickness on any long trip in the car.

 Barbie admitted that all those ups and downs on the road were hard on her.

 “I’m so glad we stopped for the yogurt, though. And yet we still won. I can’t believe it!” she said.

There's always next time. Paul said there'd be another one.