Rally Shield
NMM is an abbreviation of
'Noordwijk Mini Marathon'.
Originally modeled after the L2B,
it now is one of the largest events in the Netherlands.
The 1st edition was in 1998 and I was there.
As usual got up a bit on the late side and hurried to the start
of the NMM which was at a small castle not to many miles from
where I live.
I arrived a tad to late, but the organizers were friendly enough
to allow me to register anyway.
Un fortunately in my haste to get there I'd forgotten to bring
any money, but luckily I did bring a check.
After all that was settled I enjoyed a cup of coffee and
talked for a bit with the organizers.
They were very surprised by the big turn-out; 148 Mini's, instead
of the 80 odd that usually attend the bigger meetings.
The 'rally' as such was fairly simple; a map was given with a number of point indicated. At those points letters could be found and together you could form a word or sentence of which the 1st and last letter were given. As a tie-breaker the question was; 'How many Mini's took part in the 1st edition of the NMM'. Now that was a hard one ! :)
As I looked at the sheet I saw that the 1st letter was a C and the last a Y. As there aren't that many words ending in Y in Dutch, it struck me that the last word might be English; Century. And indeed the sentence 'Car of the Century' fitted perfectly. So even before starting I already had the answer to all the questions :)
Still, the drive was quite fun to do and even though the map was quite vague and it rained cats and dogs, I did find my way around rather well; in the end I only missed one letter.
During the prize-giving it turned out that the unthinkable had
happened; I actually had won a Mini-event!
To remind me of this 'error of my ways' I got a nice trophy that
is sitting lonely on my 'mantelpiece' :)
All in all a great event, just a shame of the weather.
