Competition Day 1

We had to leave pretty early in the morning to get to the fair grounds in a town just north of Bellingham, called Lynden. We had a mandatory meeting (well, the team captain and drivers did) at 8am! It was really hard to figure out where we were going once we got to the grounds. We saw some other teams on the road, too, and we all drove down the wrong street! Eventually we figured out where we were going.

About to take out our baby!

There are a handful of Canadian teams here, I thought that was really exciting. There’s a team from British Columbia (UBC), Manitoba (University of Manitoba), Saskatchewan (U of Regina), Queen’s University (from Kingston), and four from Quebec! (Laval, McGill, École Polytechnique, and ÉTS). There were two Canadian teams that didn't show up, though: one from Northern Ontario (RMC), and the University of New Brunswick.

Teams came from all over the United States, and a few teams drove up from Mexico – we even talked to a team who came all the way from India!

The cars here are so cool, and even though there are strict rules on what you need on your car and what metal bars you need, the baja vehicles all look different. Here are a few I’ve seen so far:

Today was registration (to let the organizers know we were here) and engine check – only 35 teams got to get checked, though. So we spent the day fixing up the car. The guys took off the CVT. I don’t know what it stands for, but its what takes the movement in the engine, and makes the wheels spin. Here’s what it looks like:

I got to help Dew Drop with the electrical stuff. We had to tape up the wires and make sure everything was waterproof. It was drizzly and we weren’t sure how muddy the track would be!

She let me hold the tape roll

I also got a chance to sit in the seat. They said I was too small to be the driver, because the restraints were too big! Dew Drop told me not to feel bad, she’s too small for the restraints, too. She can barely reach the pedals.

Maybe next year I'll be big enough to be a driver

There are three Baja SAE competitions every year: East, Midwest, and West. This year, the Midwest competition was held by Tennessee Tech, in Tennessee. That was in April, and they didn’t register because they knew the car wouldn’t be done (they also said that was exams, so they couldn’t travel because they had to write those big tests).

The East competition was the one they were hoping to go to. That one is in June, in Rochester, New York. There are only 100 teams allowed in one competition, and they didn’t register in time to make it.

The West competition is the one we are at right now. There are a total of 87 teams. Some schools entered two cars! One school that did is Oregon state. They did really well last year.

Today we also fixed up a spill guard for the gas tank. We can’t have any gas getting onto the engine, that’s a fire hazard! So this way when they’re filling the tank, it gets onto the guard, and funnelled out through a tube, onto the ground.

More stuff was done today, too: every bolt was tightened on the vehicle! The seat was taken out, too.

I don't know how many are on the car, but it sure was a lot!

The team captain checked the brake fluid, but the containers were both full! He thinks that when we were going up and down the mountains, the pressure change caused the fluid to leak out.

It was a long day, and tomorrow will hopefully be better! We’re going through technical inspection. They check to make sure our vehicle fits the rules. If it doesn’t, we can’t do any of the dynamic events on day 3. Hopefully we pass!

Day 4 : Missoula – Bellingham

Missoula is really pretty – the town is surrounded by mountains and hills, so wherever you look on the horizon you can see them.

Missoula also has an elite firefighters base. These brave men and women are called smokejumpers.

They deal with those scary wildfires that happen out on this side of the continent. But what makes them different is that they parachute into the fire! I’d be too scared to try that. There were a lot of things that related to fires here, including a fire fighting history museum and a fire sciences research facility! Will and I agreed it would be nice to live here. Dew Drop said if she wasn’t scared of heights she would want to be a smoke jumper. I was pretty sad to leave Missoula. But the scenery on the way to Bellingham is so pretty, I didn’t mind it too much.

We grabbed some breakfast at McDonalds, and Dew Drop learned that there is a difference between a sausage mcmuffin and a sausage mcmuffin with egg!

Today we crossed into Idaho from Montana (they have so many different types of license plates in Montana!), and then into Washington.

These are just a few of the ones we saw!

Right as we were leaving Missoula, we saw another train! This time it wasn’t carrying coal, and Dew Drop wasn’t sure what was in it. So we took a picture to ask her dad later. He’s a mechanical engineer. He also went to the University of Western Ontario! He says not much has changed from those days.

We passed through Idaho (Dew Drop and I were sleeping the whole time, though!), that only took us half an hour. On the drive through Washington, I saw some deer eating grass at the side of the road! It was really cool. There were also some mini waterfalls falling down the rocks on the side of the road.

It took us a while to drive to Seattle… and we managed to get there right at rush hour. It took us an extra hour to get passed the city!

Turns out that this morning, the Team Captain noticed there was brake fluid on the bottom of the baja car.

It took the paint right off!

That’s a big problem, because that stuff is what makes the car stop! I’ll explain how brakes work.
Have you ever seen how bicycle brakes work? Maybe your mom or dad can show you. See the black rubber thing in the picture? That's a brake pad.

They squeeze together on the wheel to stop it from moving. The same thing happens in a car. When you push the brake pedal, the brake fluid is what pushes the brake pads (the pads on cars are a little different looking than bicycle ones). So if the brake fluid isn’t in the brakes, then you can’t stop!

Day 3: Rocky Mountains

We started off the day slowly (they guys were waiting for Dew Drop. Apparently she’s not a morning person…). We went to the diner next door for breakfast. We headed off at 11am local time, and thankfully crossed into the Mountain time zone – so we got to the hotel an hour earlier… it was still a 12 hour drive, but this means we get to sleep in an extra hour!

The first half of the drive was more grass and more hills. In Montana, it seemed that the only radio stations were country music ones! I guess I’ve learned to like it after so many hours in the truck. When we first saw the mountains in the distance, we all got so excited. We took so many photos! Sometimes the trees got in the way, though. I’m going to upload them all onto here.

But before we saw the mountains, we saw some rock formations. They had lines running across them. Since William is in civil engineering, he took a course this year on rocks and rivers. We saw so many! And the rivers were so pretty. He explained it all to me, but he does it better. This is what he said:

It was really quite amazing seeing all the different kinds of rock formations and rivers and looking at how they were made!
Starting with those really awesome Rocky Mountains: the first thing you can see when travelling towards them is all the different layers of rock – those are the lines you see.

Those layers are there from a long time ago when water use to be there. The water dropped lots of tiny pieces of rocks and sand. That’s what makes those lines you see. The reason we can see them is that when two different pieces of land (called tectonic plates) come together, they push the ground upwards and make all these large hills and mountains. In this case, it’s the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean floor! North America got all crunched up like a piece of paper. Try and slowly push a piece into the wall (or your mom’s leg). See how it bends? Keep pushing and it might even flip upward, to try and go over what it’s running into. That’s what North America is doing to the Pacific Ocean floor: it’s moving on top of it (that’s what makes lava – melted rock. It gets really hot underground). This is still happening now, but at a very slow speed. This means the mountains are continuing to get even bigger… but it’s too slow for us to notice it.

The rivers were all really blue – Dew Drop kept trying to convince us to stop so she could swim in them. There are three main types of rivers: straight, braided, and meandering. Straight rivers are what they sound like: rivers that flow in a straight line. These are hard to find in nature (unless we build them).

Braided rivers are several very thin strands of water that move back and forth – like a hair braid.

Meandering rivers are one main river that snake across the ground and are very common (these are the ones we saw along the road so far on our trip)

The other cool thing we saw while travelling was a train carrying coal. It had two engines on it because it was so long and heavy! I love the sounds trains make. Maybe I’ll drive a train when I’m older :)

Day Two!

It was a long drive, but on the bright side, I could see the countryside for almost the entire trip.
We had breakfast at the Denny's (its a diner that serves really good breakfast food) that was beside our hotel.

Dew Drop was cranky - she hadn't had her coffee yet. Yikes!

We left at 11am local time (noon EST), and this was my view. The entire 12 hours.

Clearly the dash for an engineering truck....

A whole lot of this

And a LOT of construction. Yuck!

The sunset as really pretty, though!

We finally got to Bismark (we left Wisconsin and got halfway into North Dakota) at about 11:20pm, local time (one hour behind Toronto)
Tomorrow is going to be another late night - we have to leave North Dakota and get all the way across Montana, the hotel that's sponsoring the team doesn't have one between here and Missoula!