A Long Ride for a Good Time

Emily Horgan's mother was sobbing on the day in December when Emily set off on her big adventure.

"She's quite nervous about driving," Emily told me last week. "I think she was sure I would disappear into the desert and not come back."

Nervous? Whatever for? Emily was only about to climb into a rattletrap econo-box and then drive with two friends from England to the West African nation of Gambia, a trip that would take them through long stretches of trackless wastes and across the occasional minefield.

Why? Well, it helps to know that Emily is English. The event she was taking part in, the Plymouth-Dakar-Banjul Challenge, is also English, put together by a crazy Englishman as a sort of takeoff of the famous Paris-Dakar Rally.

In the Paris-Dakar Rally, hundreds of well-financed teams race from Europe into Africa aboard specially prepared trucks and motorcycles. The Plymouth-Dakar-Banjul Challenge, on the other hand, is like something cooked up in a pub. The entry rules state that competing vehicles must not cost more than about $200 and that "no arrangements [are] made for repatriation of bodies in the event of any serious tragedy or other cause of death en-route."

Glad they pointed that out!

Emily, 32, has lived in Washington for four years, coming here to study at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She lives in Dupont Circle, works downtown at the World Bank and gets around on a bicycle.

"Well, that's the other thing," she said. "I've never owned a car in my life."

But one bleak day last winter, she was looking at the Times of London Web site when she came across a story about the ramshackle rally and the madcap British stockbroker who had put it together.

"I e-mailed one of my friends, Vivi," Emily said. That would be Vivi Mellegard, a friend from college who works for the BBC as a documentary producer. "We'd made a pledge last year that we were going to do something adventurous and maybe go to Africa."

A few weeks before they set off, they roped in Javier Diaz, a friend who's an economist with Spain's central bank. As their ship of the desert, they chose that noted off-road vehicle, the 1991 Ford Fiesta. Two hundred cars entered the rally. They went through France, across Spain, then from Gibraltar to Morocco by ferry. Emily's team spent New Year's in Marrakech, then headed through Western Sahara and into Mauritania, where, eventually, "the tarmac stops and there's, like, nothing."

What there is is three days of driving through desert. They picked up a local guide to help the six cars in their convoy, which included a Volvo, a Citroen 2CV, a Nissan SUV, a Mercedes sedan and an old British ice cream truck. The truck, marked "Creamy Treats," was driven by two brothers from Seattle who kitted it out with a generator-powered refrigerator and wore paper hats whenever they stopped to hand out ice cream.

"Probably the best ice cream I've ever had," Emily said, "because it's so unexpected to eat ice cream in the middle of the desert."

It was often slow going, with axles buried in sand and mufflers ripped off. They threaded their way through a minefield on the border of Mauritania, greased the palms of corrupt customs officials in Senegal and, 26 days and 4,000 miles after they'd left England, arrived in Banjul, the capital of Gambia. There all of the cars were auctioned to raise money for local charities. (You can see pictures from Emily's trip at rallyforafrica.pledgepage.org/.)

Emily says she's up for doing the rally again. But she's also heard about a rally that uses old Soviet-era Ladas to drive from the United Kingdom to Tashkent. Then again, there's talk of a trip from Argentina to Colombia. . . .

Saten Made Me Do It

Kelly's First Rule of Journalism is that when a columnist is making fun of someone else's stupidity, he will inevitably make a stupid mistake. Such was the case Friday with my item about DMV dimwits in New Mexico who thought the District of Columbia was another country. I spelled the capital of the Land of Enchantment "Sante" Fe rather than the way the vast majority of New Mexicans spell it, which is "Santa" Fe.

Goat Check

After my column this month about the purloined Cabin John goat, several readers sent me an Associated Press story about a goat that wasn't quite so lucky. On Christmas Eve, four men from the western Pennsylvania township of Connellsville stole a couple's four-year-old pygmy goat, dragged it into the woods, beat it to death with a hammer, then skinned and butchered it.

According to a story in the Uniontown (Pa.) Herald Standard, "a local drug dealer known only as 'Smalls' wanted the goat meat to feed to his pit bulls, which he breeds and fights."

Sort of disturbing all around.

Poetry Corner

Don't forget that I'm in the market for Washington-themed baseball poems. I want to welcome the Nationals with open odes when they arrive in a few weeks. Any sort of poem is allowed, so long as it alludes to the unique qualities of playing our national pastime in our nation's capital (and it's 16 lines or less).

Send yours, with "Baseball Poem" in the subject field, to kellyj@washpost.comby March 21. Or mail it to John Kelly, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071. I'll pick a winner and treat its author to lunch.