Navigating Rebelle Rally – Liza And Jenna’s Story
Liza: [00:00:00] What are we gonna do? How are we gonna do this? How are we not gonna die in the desert? Here we go.
Carling: Welcome to the, I did not Sign Up for this podcast, a weekly show dedicated to highlighting the incredible stories of everyday people. No topic is off limits. Join me as we explore the lives and experiences of guests through thought-provoking, unscripted conversations. I’m your host Carling, a Canadian queer identifying 30 something year old, providing a platform for the stories that need to be heard.
Hey, Lizza,
Liza: Hey Carling
Carling: how are you?
Liza: I’m so good and so happy to be here.
Carling: God, the work. This worked out very well because you are my second guest, co-host, intro person, and this is also your episode week.
Liza: I know I even asked you like, is it gonna be weird if I also am like the interview and I do the intro and you were like no,
Carling: No, it’s perfect. You’ve got, and I’ve already said your voice is like perfect for podcasting and you’re [00:01:00] such a joy
Liza: thank you. We were talking right before you started rolling about how both of us hate our voices, but lots of people comment that they enjoy it on podcasts. So go
Carling: Yeah. Somebody said I had a soothing voice and I was like, Ugh. I don’t, I’ve never thought
Liza: I love listening to your voice. I love listening to this podcast.
Carling: We, I just thought of a fun question. So you and I met in high school. I was completely intimidated by you because you were so cool and older, and the stage manager for myfa, lady
Liza: was not cool at all for the record, for the listeners. There was nothing about me that was cool.
Carling: My God, I remember like you, Janna, Lauren, Steven, your now husband
Mike,
who? Caden ca
Caden,
Oh God. Like I was so intimidated. But we met in. Beautiful production of Myfa Lady from high
school. I wanna know what got you into drama? And at what point did it tip into, I think I wanna make this a [00:02:00] career
Liza: At what point do you wanna make a huge mistake with your life and work for free for 15 years? No. The so high school was extremely formative. Prior to that I was really a science kid and I went to, to, I went to space camp when I was 14 in Huntsville, Alabama. And I was really set on becoming a pilot so that I could go into the space program and then, In high school I started doing a lot of music and a lot of drama, and I loved hanging out in the drama studio downstairs, and I loved hanging out in the theater.
And what ended up happening was that most of my social group came out of the music in the drama department. and when I was 16, I was in a car accident and I messed up my back. I was on a city bus in Calgary going home and we got T-boned from a car and yeah. And I herniated a disc in my back so the thought of becoming a pilot at that point was like,[00:03:00]
Carling: Yeah.
Liza: I also really didn’t want to have to join the Air Force in order to go down that road, so it of made up
Carling: to be in the Air Force.
Liza: to be a Canadian astronaut. Yeah, basically, yes. At least in that time, maybe you could do it now with more of a science focus, but at that time you had to, and so I had very lofty goals and this kind of made some decisions for me.
And so I started really throwing my energy behind drama when I was in 11th grade You weren’t at the school yet, you came the next year we took a show to drama festival at the University of Calgary and I stage managed it and my now husband was the lighting designer and we.
We learned everything we could about, like how to take this show and whatever, and got a lot of praise and it blew up my ego a little bit to make me feel like, hey, stage managing is something I’m really good at. And because we had success doing.
Pat Doyle asked me to stage manage my Fair Lady, and that [00:04:00] was the icing on the cake. That was where I went, oh yeah, I need to be doing this with my life. And it just set off this path of okay, I wanna do this. I wanna be the best I can at it. I want to go to school to become the best I can at it. And it just set off this chain reaction.
I had a 15 year career in theater and then quit because ultimately a, I had to, for visa reasons, for a little while, I had to put it on pause, but I decided not to go back to it because it was just very thankless and you make no money and you work extremely hard and there’s no work life balance.
And I decided, no thanks
Carling: Yeah, but now you’re in podcasting.
Liza: Now I’m in podcasting and my husband is a television creative. And so we I’m, we’re going down the road of now our own production company and some things like that. So I still am in a creative space, just not in the same way and not for non-profit theater, which is a better fit.
What about you? What [00:05:00] prompted you to sign up an audition for my Fair Lady
because you were new to the school,
right?
Carling: 10 and I didn’t know anybody I need to get my therapist on a Patreon episode with me to deep dive into at some point when I was little, like I think watching. Full house. I decided I wanted to be Stephanie Tanner and I wanted to be an actress. And I remember at my Scholastic book Fair getting a book called how to. become a famous actor or something for kids. And I read it and I was like, okay, I need an agent. I took a, an acting class and I got, an agent, which is probably kind scammy when I look back at the, actually happened.
but I think what’s interesting about my personality is I’m all or nothing black or white. And I was going to be famous in TV and movie.
Liza: clearly,
Carling: or I wasn’t gonna do anything.
Yeah. . And what I wish, what I’m honing and appreciating now is expanding, like what you did, learning the ins and outs of many aspects of [00:06:00] an area of passion.
And then in grade 10 I was like, oh, I should sign up and audition for my fair lady. And I sang, don’t Cry for me Argentina. from,
Liza: I was there. remember your I remember your audition. I sat through all the auditions. I remember it
Carling: I’m so sorry. I remember I didn’t understand what a chorus was, like a chorus member, and I was devastated to not have a speaking role. Who was I like I’m not, I don’t
Liza: You were a really adorable Covent Garden flower girl, and you were you one of the maids in the
Carling: No, I wa no, I didn’t even get to be a
Liza: But you got to be in Ascot and you got to be at the ball.
Carling: I remember being so upset that I didn’t get a speaking role.
Liza: I think that’s very classic high school theater experience, right? We all, hope that we’re some, unpolished gem just waiting to be found and, you brought up and whatever. If I were to go back and give 15 year old Liza some [00:07:00] advice, I would not stop myself from going into theater.
Don’t get me. I love theater. It was an incredibly important part of my life for a very long time. I learned so much , but. I would tell myself that theater is not the only thing that you’re gonna do and theater does not have to define you. And your worth is not based on what a bunch of directors and actors think about you in a rehearsal room.
And it’s okay to have other interests cuz it took me a long time to give myself that permission to look beyond. The theaters to break the fourth wall as it was, and I’m glad that I did, but life could have been very different for
Carling: but I think we ended up, I think we ended up okay and I
Liza: I think we’re doing pretty
Carling: Yeah, I like, I think again, high school, my fair lady formative, Mr. Doyle, pat Doyle, was
Liza: yeah.
Carling: just influential in my life and who I became. What I find interesting is that I’ve always had that like spark or that [00:08:00] interest in performing or just being part of productions.
And so I think podcasting has really, scratched that itch,
Liza: Yeah, for sure. And you get to apply all of those things that you love about it, but now you get to define the world that you’re in and the box that you’re in, and it’s great.
Carling: Yeah. And I’m like, I’m actually, I love like the analytics and the editing and the, strategy and all that behind the scenes stuff that I didn’t think that I would want
Liza: you’re producing.
You’re producing. It’s you’re producing. That’s exactly what producing
that’s awesome. I have to brag about Steven, who was also a theater kid, got his start in theater. He was a a rigger, he was a technical director. He was a lighting guy who worked a lot of calls all throughout Calgary then decided to go to film school, has had quite a successful career as a result of that.
But recently he was in Calgary. For the premiere of the last of us on H B O. And this was really wild and crazy. They had it at the Jubilee Auditorium where Steven used to do rigging calls when he [00:09:00] was like 19. And some of the guys that he did rigging calls with 20 some odd years.
Are still there and did the call for the last of us screening and it was pretty awesome. And the last of us, of course, is filmed entirely in Calgary and I’m having so much fun watching it because I haven’t lived in Calgary in 20 years, but I haven’t seen my city, being just torn apart in this post-apocalyptic zombie drama.
That is so good. It’s so good.
Carling: I like post-apocalyptic, but I get scared of zombies, but I’m gonna watch it be a, cause it’s
Calgary. I’ve heard nothing but good things
Liza: It’s gonna rip your heart out and chew it up and spit it out, and then you know you’re gonna pick yourself up and watch the next episode because it’s so good.
It’s so good.
Carling: Let’s also not forget his role in my Fair Lady as Eliza Doolittle’s father.
Liza: Yeah. Alfred p Doolittle, he was, and the rest is history. We started dating the week that my Fair Lady opened.
Carling: Oh my God, that’s amazing. I.[00:10:00] Appreciate you so much being on this little intro and also sharing this entire episode. We’re about to hear the episode with you
Liza: know. Thank you for having us. It was so great to sit down and chat with you and and relive our adventure out there in the desert in our Land Rover. It was really cool.
Carling: Listening to the amount of enthusiasm and just joy that it brought you was so amazing and I thought, what a perfect fit for this episode’s coming out on Valentine’s Day. And so I thought having an, I literally signed up for this segment.
Liza: Yeah. And it’s a Valentine’s thing, right? We did this all women’s event, and it’s all about women’s empowerment and, women finding out that they’re so much stronger than they think and yeah. So happy Valentine’s Day. Carlin
Carling: Day. All right, let’s get into this episode. You haven’t even heard it yet, so I’m so excited and I
hope you have a good day and tell me what you think of it after. Okay. Okay. Bye.
Liza: Bye.[00:11:00] hello, Liza and Jenna,
Hi darling.
Jenna: morning.
Carling: are you?
Liza: So good. So happy to be here. Longtime listener. First time caller.
Carling: Except you can’t say that now cuz you were on our Patreon.
Liza: I was on your Patreon, so just recently, in
fact, talking about the super boring topic of immigration into the United States.
Carling: I thought it was so interesting and a lot of people were like, oh wow, I didn’t know like how many visas there.
Liza: It’s crazy. It’s crazy.
Carling: Well, I’m super excited to chat with you. This is a special episode that I’m sort of calling. I literally signed up for it because I’ve wanted to have you guys on to tell your story, but I was like, how do we swing it so that it kind of fits what, what we talk about here?
So I would love it if [00:12:00] you could each introduce yourself, tell us like a little bit about who you are, what you do, where you’re from, and then we’ll get into what you literally signed up for.
Liza: Sure I’ll start. I’m Liza I live in Los Angeles, of course, I know Carling from way back in the day We were in high school together. We were drama nerds together. We had a lot of similar friends and I’ve been a big fan of the show ever since you guys started it
I have been living in the US for almost 17 years. I moved here with my husband in 2006. Who you guys also know is also he was my high school sweetheart, yeah, I’m a jack of all trades. I teach Pilates for a living. Prior to that, I had a 15 year career as a production manager in theater.
I have an eight year old daughter, so I’m a full-time mom. and I have way too many hobbies and I tend to dive a little head first into things. And after many years of being an outdoor enthusiast and a [00:13:00] camper and an off-road enthusiast that kind of led me to where I am now and how I met Jenna, which I think we’ll get into in a little bit.
Carling: Great.
Jenna: so that’s a good segue. . I’m Jenna, I actually live up in Oregon, I’m an architect. I have my own little architecture firm up here and we do a lot of main street revitalization work as well as homes and kind of anything fun that sparks our interest.
And my husband actually owns a Land Rover. Workshop. So it specializes in vintage 1950s and sixties, mostly land Rovers. And we take lots of crazy trips on them. Pretty much every vacation I’m using air quotes, every vacation we take is a bit of a project of lots of slow driving experience on all of the elements from inside of the car.
and lots of fun trails and camping and backcountry, you know, food. I don’t adventures, let’s say
Liza: uh,
Jenna: lots of [00:14:00] repairs on the road. And so it’s always, our vacations are a bit of a project, but it’s fun and epic and, you see so many cool things that you wouldn’t see otherwise. So Liza and I met through Land Rovers cuz both of our husbands are diehard Land Rover collectors and enthusiasts.
As are we, I, we always say it’s through our husbands. We met through our husbands, but really we also share that common
Liza: It’s true, it’s true. I blame
them. I blame them for this whole thing getting started. But Jenna and I meeting and becoming friends ended up being destiny. I think , my husband and I collect Vintage Land Rovers. It’s a weird thing to collect, but we do, and when you collect Vintage Land Rovers, it turns out you need to have a really good vintage Land Rover guy.
Steven and Ike were friends for a long time. They knew each other through, you know, needing, you call that guy to ask advice, to order parts to whatever, and they have a really Similar personality. They’ve got a good sense of humor. They hit it off right away. But it took a while until Jenna and I met each other in person and we met each other and clicked [00:15:00] right away and formed a friendship.
And that was in January of 2020. And of course then the world shut down and we didn’t really get to spend a whole lot of time together. But I had this idea for this thing I wanted to do on the horizon. And of as soon as I met Jenna, it became really clear that hey, Jenna would be a really good person to ask because you have similar interests.
She’s got lots of experience driving Land Rovers. This could be really cool. And that was what kind of led us to becoming partners on a pretty epic adventure last year.
Carling: Yeah. So you both signed up to participate in something called Rebel Rally. I called it Rebel Rally
Liza: That’s right. Rebel Rally
Carling: Yeah. To for
Liza: Everybody makes that same mistake. Think about Rebel. Like Rebel paired with Bell, like a beautiful woman. So think about a beautiful woman that defies convention and doesn’t go along with the status quo.
Carling: love that. So what’s the best way to [00:16:00] explain if somebody’s like, what’s Rebel Rally? What is it?
Liza: Great question. So the Rebel Rally is an all women’s off-road navigation. It’s the longest rally in the United States. It was eight days of competition. It was 12 days in total from start to finish. We covered 1600 miles or about 2,600 kilometers of back road country trails in the American West, primarily Nevada and California.
And it is map and compass only. So no cell phones, no g p s, no modern technology. You are out there for eight days with nothing but a map and compass to get you from point A to point B. and the whole purpose of the rally, like the whole way that it is scored and the whole objective of it is to try to collect as many checkpoints as you can in a day.
So at about 5:00 AM they wake you up, they give you a [00:17:00] list of checkpoints. By five 30, you have roughly two hours to plot all of these latitude, longitude coordinates onto your map and figure out how you’re gonna get from point A to point B. And by about 7, 7 30 in the morning, you’re in the car, just the two of you, and you’re off hunting checkpoints for the rest of the day.
Jenna was our driver. I was our navigator and we did the whole thing in my 1994 Land Rover Defender 90, which is coincidentally, it was one of Steven’s first vehicles. It was the vehicle that we got married and drove away in, and it’s the one that we’ve had all these years. And yeah, it was a pretty epic adventure.
Carling: That’s what I don’t even know. I remember printing like MapQuest, where you would look it up and then you had to print the step-by-step. And even that was a little beyond like my [00:18:00] navigational capabilities. And so this is incredible. I love this. Jenna, was this the first time you had heard of it when Liza brought it up to you?
Jenna: Oh yeah. Liza just casually mentioned it at one point, and and then I did some Google stalking. I’m like, oh, that’s pretty cool. And then I think we had a few texts back and forths where it was like a non-committal, but just pie in the sky. Oh what would we drive?
And oh, what would we name our team? Some really like
Liza: We were thinking about it very, abstract.
Jenna: And then in the spring of last year or like February, March, I don’t know, Liza was like, oh, hey, actually they do these training weekends and I think I’m gonna sign up for the training weekend and just see what this is about.
It’ll be a good, taste of the process of what you would actually do. And you can learn some of the skills. And basically the rebel offers these official training courses that are, or workshops I guess you might call them. it’s two days of driving training and two days of navigation training.
And it happens down in Southern [00:19:00] California. And so Liza was like, I’m gonna sign up for this training.
You should come. It’s like less expensive for each of us if we just both, are going together in one car. And it’s not the same as having two entire enrollments or whatever.
So I was like, okay, sure, let’s do that. And so I like bought a plane ticket and zoomed down there and we made it
Liza: day. I think I told her about it by four o’clock. That same day. She was like, okay, I booked a flight here. This is when I’m coming in.
Jenna: Yeah, so we went and did this training weekend in the spring and we hadn’t really spent that much time together, right? Like we’ve hung out a little bit, but we’ve never done a, project together and, or spent a lot of, focus time together. I think we were both feeling that out in addition to the skills and just understanding what this event was about.
Like also just feeling each other out. Do we have a good chemistry? Yeah. Can we solve problems together without , getting upset or bickering or does it, is it, does it go smoothly?
Liza: And I think it was safe to say that by the end of the first day of that four day weekend, we both.[00:20:00]
okay, this could really work. This could really, we had really good chemistry in the car. We had really compatible communication styles. We both had a lot of good interests. We both had a good attitude about it. And, by the end of the first day, both of us were like, I and I said to Jenna, by the way, I may have signed us up on the wait list for 2022.
Now, I didn’t think we were gonna get in when I put our name on the wait list. I thought that all I was doing was giving us a priority window to sign up for 2023. I was thinking we’re gonna need at least a year and a half to kind of prep for this. So this was back in, we did this training at the end of April I was thinking, there’s no way we’re gonna get in this October.
That would just be crazy. By the end of the training weekend, we were crossing our fingers and we were obsessively checking our email for the next couple of weeks, hoping that maybe a spot would open up. and they had indicated, Hey, chances [00:21:00] are good. People drop out, people have to change their plans or defer to the next year.
There’s a good chance you could get in here. And we were just crossing our fingers. And the day that we found out we got in, there were a lot of expletives in our text messages. We, there was a lot of, exclamation points and a lot of freaking out. I think I, I. excused myself from work for a minute to go call Jenna in the parking lot and scream a little cuz we were pretty excited.
But once we found out we were in for 2022, we also had this holy crap, we have a lot to do, so much to prep. And from then on it was just like, okay, head down.
Carling: That’s incredible. Did either of you grow up learning about compasses and having a passion for maps and navigation
Liza: Both of us love maps. There’s no question there. Like you made the MapQuest joke not that long ago for sure. I love maps. I have a good sense of direction. I’ve always known. But I’d never done anything like this. [00:22:00] Yes, I’d looked at a compass before. I’d used it to find North once or twice. I’d never actually used a compass to get me, from point A to point B.
I’d never really done orienteering sure I’d played around with one, but I’d never actually used one in any meaningful way. That was the most intimidating thing going into this, was learning the navigation skills and just constantly being worried that we were gonna show up and be out in the middle of the desert standing there going, wh where do we, what do we do?
Where do we go? What happens in next? And we were really lucky that we did enough training and prep that we never felt that way, but that was definitely our fear going into it. The navigation was the scary part of the training.
Carling: Yeah.
Jenna: Yeah, totally. I had, I was in Girl Scouts when I was little, right? Like we learned, I had a compass somewhere floating around in our camping box that I never take on trips with me and I never really used. And I think Liza and I both bonded early in our, like in that [00:23:00] training weekend, for example, over our.
Shared love of maps,
So we knew we were dusting maps and sticky notes and office supplies. Oh my God. All the pens. All the good pens. Yeah. . So we knew, we were like, we were really good in the classroom basically with the maps. And we’ve discovered that during the, that workshop of just we were the unintentional, we were trying very hard not to be the like, front row arm waving.
Yeah total try hards. But we were to, we couldn’t help, we were just there, we were so excited. We were like, oh, we know where this one is. Oh, we totally got it. And so in the classroom we were just killing it. Like the mapping, the being accurate, the triangulating and all of this no problem.
Liza: I think both, both Jenna and I, obviously Jenna is an architect.
She has tremendous amounts of drafting in her background. I studied a lot of drafting in theater school designing sets and things like that. And I think that paired with, our sort of attention to detail. [00:24:00] Neither of us are math pros, but we’re not slouches at it either. So like the math, there’s a lot of math involved in calculating speeds and distances and things like that, that we found, hey, this came naturally to us.
We didn’t struggle with the theoretical part of all of this. And so we were doing really good in the classroom work. We had these maps in front of us and all these lists of coordinates, and we were cooking along, we were feeling good about our ability to do this. Then we got behind the wheel, we got in the car and was like, okay, now go find this checkpoint.
And it was, that was the hardest thing. That was like, oh, it was very humbling in that weekend trying to go and be accurate and find these checkpoints. And when I say accurate, in some cases on the rebel rally, they’ll give you a long LA coordinate of some place in space that is imaginary. There’s nothing there to indicate that is the checkpoint you’re trying to find.
And you have to read the map [00:25:00] and the terrain you have to read the topography, you have to carefully track your distance in the vehicle. And we realize on that training weekend that we were gonna need some tools that we did not yet have, including a very specific trip computer called a terra trip that, basically each meter that you’re traveling along the road so that we could be as accurate as possible.
But we get out there and we’re trying to, find these imaginary checkpoints and realizing, oh, this is the hard part. Okay, this is the part we’re gonna struggle. . That was what we both spent the next six months trying to focus on, practicing whenever we could get together. And we live in two different states we had to sit down and go, okay, how are we gonna be in the car together in a meaningful way prior to this event so that we can hammer out some of these skills?
And that was part of our prep. There was a lot of work that we put into the vehicle. There was a lot of work we had to do to get sponsors. The Rebel rally is really [00:26:00] expensive. So we came outta that training weekend going, okay, we know what came easy to us. We know what we need to work on.
we just had to put our heads down and start learning. And we talked to each other almost every day for the next six months. Maybe we’d go a day or two without, but we were texting, we were calling, we were FaceTiming, and, just tackled it. I think like we would, any project that we did together
Jenna: there’s a really specific deadline. ,
Carling: Yeah.
Jenna: ready for that
deadline. Yeah. The car had to be ready too. The car had to be ready too mechanically. So there was that whole layer of complexity too, which is an interesting segue into like the car that we drove was one of the three oldest cars in the event this year.
it’s not that is necessarily a handicap, but it definitely presents a whole different layer of considerations when you’re planning for the trip. There are many teams that are factory sponsored in a brand new vehicle. Whereas we’re very responsible not only for getting the car ready, , which Steven and Liza put so much time and [00:27:00] effort and energy into.
But then also keeping the car maintained during the event. Bringing a lot of spare parts and even just the planning ahead of what spare parts and spare fluids, and spare all the things do we need to bring. So many tools, so many like repair kits, patch kits, sealants, gasket maker, just extra hardware, things that could fail on the trail.
Liza: Yeah, we made a lot of friends in our training weekend many of whom are driving brand new vehicles. A 2021 Bronco, a 2022 Santa Cruz. They had a very different packing list, a very different prep than we had. And when we would compare stories, our concerns was about making sure that we had everything that we could possibly have on board that could go wrong in a 30 year old vehicle.
A classic defender is, pretty modern by Land Rover standards, but it’s not a modern, new vehicle. And there was plenty of things that [00:28:00] we needed to know how to do that we had to be really mindful of driving this thing out in the desert. And it turned out that there was a lot of things we had to fix on the fly while we were out there.
Carling: And so with the newer vehicles, do they have to somehow disable their gps? Because the first thing I thought was like they probably have all this built in fancy stuff.
Liza: They have to disable it and or completely blank out that, center console screen that gives you all that information and then it has to be approved by the rebel rally, officials make sure that it is up to code and get checked frequently and stuff like that.
And so a lot of these new vehicles, it’s getting increasingly difficult to disable those things. It’s so tied into, how the vehicle works and performs and it’s tied into their computers. It’s getting harder and harder for them to turn off that satellite.
Carling: In terms of packing, like, where did you sleep? Where did you go to the bathroom? And what did you eat ?
Liza: So we were lucky enough that the Rebel rally includes what is called [00:29:00] Base Camp, and it’s a mobile base camp that moves with us. Base camp includes our food. They provided us with breakfast and dinner on most days. And then lots of things to pack to take for lunch. It included a big tent with big round tables that we did all of our plotting and prep in the morning, and then eight hour dinner at in the evening. and that was true for much of the rebel. They also included mobile restrooms. So when you were back at base camp, you know they had porta-potties and they had a couple of pretty potties is what we like to call them. They’re like little trailers with portable showers and, and bathrooms.
I have to say most rebels don’t use the showers in the first half of the week cuz they’re a, not smelly enough yet. And B, it’s too cold by the end of the week. Everybody smells every, we all smell. We’re all. We’re all very ripe. You just get used to rebels being really smelly. And base camp also includes a mechanics village with some mechanics support provided by their [00:30:00] staff, which is really helpful.
But in terms of sleeping and everything else, we were in tents with sleeping bags. We were hauling our own gear across the desert. My job at the end of the day would be to set up And Jenna would take the vehicle over and get it fueled and take it to the mechanics village. And the next morning, her job was to break down camp while I was busy plotting and, prepping our route for the day so that we had any semblance of an idea of where we were going.
So we had very specific tasks I think we learned a lot about what we will take for next year and what we didn’t need, that we won’t take for next year. We’re already talking about ways to condense our pack down. You don’t need as much as you think you do for sure. But you also have to be prepared for a little bit of everything.
Carling: What did you take that you didn’t need? What’s off your list for next year?
Jenna: We brought a lot of snacks from home, like from the grocery. We brought so many like tote bags of like fruit bars and crunchy things, salty [00:31:00] crunchies, like salty sweet or crunchy sweet cookies and cold brews and the cold brews. We went through almost all the cold brews, but like we brought a lot of superfluous snacks that we probably could pair down on because we can get most of what we need just from base camp in the morning.
Liza: It’s true. Jenna discovered that sometimes breakfast could be taken and eaten on the fly. And like when you’re getting up at five in the morning, I don’t know about you, I can’t eat a big breakfast at five o’clock in the morning. My, my system is not fully functioning yet.
Get me some coffee, maybe a little fruit, maybe a yogurt, but that’s about all I can handle. But Jenna figured out on some days they would make these really yummy breakfast sandwiches or these like pancakes with bacon and eggs and stuff wrapped in it like a burrito. And she realized that she could like, take them on the go and we’d have 11 z we’d be driving in about 10 30, 11 o’clock in the morning.
We’d both get hungry and we’d break out what we would’ve eaten for breakfast had we been, fully functioning at that hour of the day. [00:32:00] But yeah, we didn’t eat as many snacks as we did my clothing bag. With all my gear, I think I’m gonna try to pair that down by 20% next year. It was bigger than it needed to be.
I can rewear a lot of tops that, I overpacked cuz I wasn’t sure what the temperature was gonna be this event took place in October. and we started in northern California and really remote northern Nevada super, super far out in the desert in Nevada. There’s nothing out there. The first couple nights were chilly. We were really lucky this year we got really nice weather. But it can be really cold when you’re at the higher elevations or you’re further north by the end of the event though, you’re in Southern California, you are just you’re 20 minutes away from the Mexican border in the sand dunes of Glams.
It’s hot. It was a hundred degrees the day that we were in Glams, that’s 38 40 degrees Celsius. So you experience a pretty wide range. And then, we probably overdid it on the parts, [00:33:00] but heaven forbid if we hadn’t brought those parts with us how much you wanna bet, we would’ve absolutely needed it.
We had a steering leak just before we left for the event. Our steering box was leaking a little bit, so we had Ike overnight us a steering box from his workshop and we carried this like 35 pound box with a steering box in it, leaking oil all around the desert, just in case we needed to replace our steering box.
Was that necessary? No. But had we not had it, would we have needed it? Probably
Jenna: Yeah.
Carling: And this mechanics village that you would go to every night, like D, did it have mechanics on site or are you responsible for complete maintenance of your vehicle?
Liza: 50. 50. I’m gonna let Jenna answer that one cuz she did all of our maintenance.
Jenna: So basically the mechanics village is a big trailer that they bring from base camp to base camp. And there are mechanics as that are part of the crew for the course [00:34:00] or for the event. And
Liza: basically.
Jenna: you’re allowed to use the mechanics workshop area for like two hours use it on your own and they can advise you during that time, but not actually work on your vehicle without a penalty.
So if you need the mechanics to actually work on your vehicle for you, you get a penalty. If you exceed two hours, even just working in that area on your own.
if
a penalty. But generally we were able to do all of the tinkering we needed to do within that time. And, the mechanics would be advising us, but they can’t help but get their hands a little dirty.
So that was
Liza: They, they’re, and they’re all really
good guys. And they’re they’re, they
Jenna: and gals.
Liza: and gals. Yeah.
you’re right. And they wanna see us succeed and they, there’s such a wide variety of vehicles in this event from brand new Broncos and Rivian and things like that too.
Us and a 1968 Ford Bronco so they [00:35:00] really, they’re very skilled mechanics with a lot of experience. They helped us out a number of times, thank goodness. But Jenna was a real badass. And we prepped a lot in advance. We brought our entire workshop manual with us.
We brought bins worth of parts and tools and things that we might need. And, and we had a checklist and Jenna would roll into the mechanics village and she would start checking everything. And I would go get us food and I’d come meet her in the village and say, Hey, how’s it looking? And she’d be like I just replaced our rear shocks, cuz they.
Completely trashed or on day one we had this like really noticeable wiggle in the front wheel that was not supposed to be there, like the whole thing when you pushed it and you jiggled it and jiggled too much. And we knew that wasn’t right. And we had, and Jenna had to take apart the entire front driver’s side hub.
we figured out how to get it with mechanics going, I wouldn’t do that. I’d maybe do this instead. And, they helped [00:36:00] us out along the way, but really Jenna did that work herself. we had one mechanical failure on the course that was kind of terrible and kind of destroyed our whole day.
So it was on day five and we got through what is called an Enduro, which is the most stressful part of the whole thing. And we roll into a checkpoint and we get out and we’d been having starting issues with it. And we get out of the car and we come up with a plan for what we’re gonna do next.
I have a case of the giggles, so I need a minute to compose myself, and we go to get back in the car and it doesn’t start, and it won’t start. we realize, oh crap, this is maybe a bigger, okay, so we yard sail out everything out of the back of the truck and we get our parts bin and all the stuff that we need and we start figuring out, we start trying to figure out, okay, we don’t have we seem to have fuel.
The engine is turning. We seem to get, be getting air. Maybe it’s the spark. So we change out the starter coil. [00:37:00] Which we had troubles with earlier in the summer and we had learned how to change that out. So Jenna’s like carefully taking out this wire and attaching it over here, and then taking out this wire and, we’re being very meticulous about it.
And we change out the starter and it works. It somehow works. And all these other cars are coming by other teams checking on us. Hey, are you guys okay? Everything good? We think we have it solved. We put everything back in the truck, we get ready to get back out on course. We’ve only missed about half an hour of the day at this point.
And again, it won’t start. We have now, gone through our checklist. We’ve looked at everything that we know how to do and we’ve gone, okay, this feels electrical and this feels like it could be a bigger problem than we know how to solve right here in this moment. We need mechanical
support. And so at every green checkpoint on the rebel, there is a staff member there, and there’s anywhere five to eight green checkpoints a day. So you’re constantly, around staff members of the rebel [00:38:00] partly for safety. And, I walked up to them and I said, Paul, I think we’re gonna need some help.
And they called, the head mechanic who was about half an hour away to come and join us and we start taking things apart. And in the end, the problem ended up being a ground wire that had shredded itself apart while we were out there and it was causing it to sometimes connect.
Sometimes a vehicle would start and then sometimes it wouldn’t. But it was really deep down inside our distributor. That’s not something that we necessarily would’ve known how to fix ourselves. We have a lot of mechanical know-how now, but we didn’t necessarily know how to find that one. So that was a good instance where, hey, we’re gonna need the mechanics.
Yes, we’re gonna take a penalty on course, but like otherwise the whole event could be over for.
Carling: Yeah.
Liza: to get us back on the road. What ends up happening though is that your checkpoints are all they’re gated in the sense that you have a maximum amount of time to [00:39:00] collect that checkpoint, and if you miss that end time for that checkpoint, you have to s it’s like a cutoff.
You have to skip ahead and you have to skip everything and go to the next green checkpoint that is open. By the time this mechanical issue got solved for us, we were out there for almost three hours trying to solve this problem. It shot our whole day, every point we got for the rest of the day, and we got ’em all, we got every point we could get that day.
But none of them counted. None of them counted towards our score because we had timed out. It was like, okay, this is part of the learning experience. This is part of understanding anything can happen out here.
Jenna: and we’d made the decision to go ahead and try to collect those checkpoints anyways because they would still show up on our report card at the end of the day. So it was really good practice to still just learn, being accurate, navigating well, and and just seeing how we would’ve done even if we,
Liza: and how we performed under pressure. Because immediately after that mechanical failure, we were headed out on what [00:40:00] is called an on route enduro where instead of having a map to follow, they give you turn by turn directions.
Just like we used to print off of MapQuest to get from point A to point B. Imagine that it was that, but on backcountry roads it was 347 kilometers. It was a 42 page bound booklet of turn by turn directions, right? And it was like, okay, we, we’re so far behind today, we do not have time to make even a single mistake thats it.
We’ve used up all of our grace today. We need to just be perfect. And we had to hit this road book and just go. And so what that looks like is I’m in the passenger seat with this book and Jenna is driving and we have this trip computer and we’re tracking, okay. In 7.2 kilometers, we’re gonna bear right at 320 degrees.
Okay? Great. Okay. That’s in four kilometers we’re gonna be bearing right at [00:41:00] 320 degrees. Okay? And then, okay, we’re approaching the turn in 500 meters. In 400 meters in three. Okay. Okay. We’re
gonna take
Here to the right, and. and it’s just constant communication and this ended up being a five hour Enduro of just literally constant communication and we made one turn wrong on that whole thing, and it was the tiniest little thing that we were quickly able to go, whoops, that was it.
We have to go back, turn around, keep going. Otherwise, we nailed it because we had to. The pressure that day to perform was like we can’t make any more mistakes today. The mechanical failure wasn’t a mistake per se, but it meant that there was just no room to be anything but perfect for the rest of that day.
Carling: Liza, do you feel like you have a new appreciation for the Google Maps lady that talks the voice? That’s like in 300
Liza: yes,
Carling: turn
Liza: yes. I definitely had a superiority complex. When I came home from the Rebel, I was like, I don’t need G P s.
I’m good without it. I’m such a [00:42:00] good navigator. I don’t need this. , what’s funny is that I do use GPS all the time. I love it for knowing, especially in la I love it for knowing my expected arrival.
I like being able to see what traffic is doing. But I try really hard not to rely on it to get me from point A to point B. I try to use it. just for that e t a, prediction so that I, or so that I can see what traffic is doing, because I really like to challenge myself and try to figure out different routes around things without relying on it too much.
Carling: I feel like that little, like estimated time of arrival, I always take it as a challenge. I’m like, oh, you think 35 minutes. And I think I could do it in 28. . I don’t know if that’s like a good like thing to do. But when you talk about penalty, can you talk a bit about like the points, the, like how do you win the event and what’s being counted, what isn’t and all of that.
Liza: That’s a great question. Jenna, do you wanna take that one?
Jenna: I [00:43:00] can start it. So basically there’s three kinds of checkpoints. There’s the green ones, which Liza mentioned, where there’s a bigger checkpoint, it has a big flag, and there’s usually a staff person there. And those are really they’re required, those are mandatory checkpoints. They’re of like safety checks for the staff to keep track of all the competitors and see if anything, is going wrong.
And it’s also a great point, if you need to connect with staff on something, it’s at one of those green checkpoints. So, There was one day that we found somebody else’s GPS tracker that had fallen off their car. And so we we satellite phoned in and we met, at the next green checkpoint.
We dropped it off. So that’s, it’s we are equipped with satellite technology. We just cannot use the satellite technology except when we’re at a checkpoint.
Liza: An emergency, right? It’s
there if something
goes wrong, and it’s also there so that the staff and people at home watching can see where we are. We just can’t see any of that
Carling: Yeah.
Jenna: Yeah. So there’s grain checkpoints and then there’s blue checkpoints, which often have some sort of marker. It may not be a big flag, it may just [00:44:00] be a little pole sticking out of the ground that’s painted blue. And and then there’s black checkpoints which have no marker. And so basically you’re driving around, you’re following this route that you’ve mapped by hand based on the points that you’ve charted by hand and that hope of, hopefully, we’ve charted correctly.
There are definitely some
Liza: every now and then there was wait.
I must,
I, this can’t be it, . I, I must have plotted this incorrectly. Hang on.
Jenna: Or they also give you, they’ll sneak a coordinate in the list in the morning at five in the morning. There’ll be like a couple that are formatted differently. They’ll be like in minutes and seconds instead of decimal degrees. And if you don’t catch it, you’ll map the wrong
Liza: you’ll totally plot it, you know, half the kilometer off course where it’s not supposed to be,
Jenna: Yeah. And you’ll see a bunch of people have checked that, clicked at that point mistakenly cuz they clearly plotted at the wrong spot or at the, using the wrong format. Basically you get to a checkpoint then and you confirm you’re there. Whether that’s because you see a flag or because you, you’ve very carefully [00:45:00] navigated if it’s a black checkpoint for example, you can triangulate with your compass off of nearby mountain tops and whatnot to try to make sure that you are where you think you are.
And so once you feel comfortable that you’re in the right spot, you get your little handheld GPS tracker and you go by that spot and you click it and then it reads out what your actual coordinates are at that time. And so in the case of a black checkpoint, you can actually then replot that point on the map and compare and see how far away from your goal spot you are.
And those points for the green checkpoint and the blue checkpoint. It’s just, if you’re at the flag and you click it, you’re gonna get full points. For the black checkpoint.
Liza: There’s
like a
Jenna: radius of, yeah, so the it steps down. The number of points you collect, steps down. The farther away, the less accurate you are, the fewer points, and
Liza: most of them. It’s about a 30 meter radius to get full points. So if you’re within 30 meters radius of you’re gonna get those full points and then it’ll step down. Like [00:46:00] every, it could be 25 meters, every 25 meters outside of it. You’re gonna lose a point each time until you get none.
And if you completely miss it, if you’re completely outside of that radius, you’re going to get a wide miss penalty. Once you have that wide miss penalty, you only take that penalty once until your next checkpoint. And so they do that partly to encourage you to really be careful about when you’re clicking, not just randomly clicking while you’re out there hoping you’re on a checkpoint
Jenna: But it’s not a treasure hunt.
Liza: Exactly. It’s not a treasure hunt. But then also, Should you get lost, you have a tool to get yourself back on track because when you click that tracker, it’s gonna read out your long LA and you’re gonna let LA Long, whatever, and you’re gonna be able to then take that, plot it on your map and go, oh crap, we are not where we thought we were. I’m only saying this from experience.
It only happened to us once. It only happened to us once where we were ridiculously lost. We were in the Inyo National [00:47:00] Forest. We had cut through Death Valley. We had come into the Inyo National Mountain or National Forest. Up in this mountain. We had found this really difficult to find checkpoint up on the hill, looking out at the Sierra Nevadas.
It was breathtaking. And another team was having a hard time finding it. And we passed them and they said, do you know where that blue checkpoint is? And we said, yeah, it’s just back there a little bit. They said, great. We just came from Papoose Flats. Turns out they did not come from Papoose Flats.
That’s where I thought we were headed. That is not where they had come from. They had come from another flat and I took them at their word and I didn’t check our bearing. And we went down the mountain and in the whole way it’s amazing what you can convince yourself. I’m sitting there and I’m watching things go by and I’m watching the turns in the road and I’m saying that, that could be that. Sure.
Jenna: We didn’t know we were lost until we got to the point where we thought was gonna be this black checkpoint on the top of this other hill.
Liza: I was looking for this okay, in about half a kilometer, [00:48:00] we’re gonna take this like wide left turn and then a hair pin, right?
And then the checkpoint is gonna be right there. We did exactly that. It wasn’t exactly where I thought it was. I just thought I didn’t plot it very accurately. Oh, we get to this point and I click the tracker and we look at it and both of us, like our stomach dropped and we went, ah.
Jenna: how are we here? That can’t be right. Is that right?
Liza: And like we weren’t just a little off, we were two and a half degrees off of where we were supposed to be. We were like a good solid 20 kilometers away from where we were supposed to be.
So I think, our first year in the rebel rally, so much of it was just about learning these things.
You can train and you can prep, and you can plan, and you can talk to other competitors and you can go into it thinking you’re as prepared as you possibly can be. But we found that there were things that you just can’t prepare for it. You just have to experience them getting lost in the National Forest.
That was one of those days, [00:49:00] dealing with our mechanical failure on day five. That was one of those things that, You just have to deal with it as best as you can in the moment,
Carling: yeah. And so how many teams total were there? And I guess, can you give an indication of like, how many points does the winner get? What’s like a, I dunno, quantify it a little
Liza: That’s a great question. Without me looking at the exact standings. I think the top, five teams are somewhere in the range of about 11 to 1200 points throughout the course of eight days. And I don’t know where we ended up. We were somewhere around 8, 8, 8 to 900. I think maybe in total, they do it in a way that like you’re gonna get points, even if you’re out there and you’re not trying to be super competitive, you’re just going, you can make the choice.
You’re just go after the green checkpoints and the trails are gonna be a little bit easier, the navigation is gonna be a little bit easier and it’s not gonna be as taxing on your vehicle. Some teams go out [00:50:00] there They know they’re not trying to win the whole damn thing. They’re not trying to, kill their car, kill themselves out there.
They’re just trying to have a good time. And so you can really scale up or down, depending on how competitive you wanna be as first timers. We came in 29th out of 55 teams, I think one of those teams did not start the event. They had an issue importing their vehicle or something.
So I think in reality it was 54 out there on the trail with us. . But yeah, you’re going to get points at those green checkpoints no matter what you do. So you’re not gonna finish this event with a score of zero or a score of a hundred or something. Like you’re gonna get a minimum number of points throughout the event.
Jen and I recognized, and we went into this with really clear communication with each other about what we expected of ourselves, what we wanted to achieve. And every day we would have a plan I think we should do this. I think we should do that. I think we should wait and see by this point in the day.
If we’re doing good on [00:51:00] time, then I think we should do this one. And if not, I think we should skip it and just go right to this. And then other times throughout the day, there was no planning involved. It was like you had to deal with whatever unexpected thing came up, and now we’re having to change plans on the fly.
But we went into it with a really clear expectation of this is how competitive we think we can be. , this is what we wanna do. And here’s what I can tell you about Jenna. Given the choice, if she can take what’s called an X route, which is usually a little harder to drive or a little harder to navigate, she’s always gonna opt for it.
If you give her the choice between the regular route or the this special X route, she’s always gonna take it.
Jenna: Because the extra routes are intended by the the Emily Miller who like is the organizer of this whole event. They’re intended to show you really cool
Liza: They were
Jenna: they’re the option of they’re like the scenic route, what are we out there for if we don’t wanna see the scenic route?
Liza: And we always had this attitude of gratitude out there like, oh my God, can you believe where we are? Can you [00:52:00] believe what we’re seeing?
we really wanted to finish the rebel in our first year, kind of in the middle of the pack. We figured we don’t wanna come in dead last, we want to finish. We don’t want a dnf, we wanna make sure the car can finish the event.
Some of these competitors have been doing it from the beginning. They’re OG Rebels. This was the seventh year the event has been happening and they’ve been doing this a long time. And we wanted to be really realistic and what we could achieve both in our first year doing it in a 30 year old vehicle, right?
And we’ve been talking a lot. We are gonna do it in 2023. And we’ve been talking a lot about, okay, let’s readjust our expectations. We learned these things. We took these lessons with us knowing what we know now, knowing how much we improved from day one of year one to day eight of year one.
Jenna: Yeah. I can’t wait.
Carling: can you talk a bit about what is the like skill of driving? , are you always on roads? Are you just floating in the middle of [00:53:00] a sand dune?
Liza: I’m gonna jump in and tell you that Jenna Friley is one of the best goddamn drivers I’ve ever driven with in my life. She’s so good. I will shout it from the mountaintops and she’s going to be very humble and gracious. But I want you to know she is a badass
Jenna: Thank you. Lizza So the terrain though to answer your question is actually, it’s varied, right? So you do end in sand dunes in the imperial sand dunes near Glams. That’s the last day of the competition. So there you are totally just just going across these marshmallowy sand dunes and trying to find checkpoints.
And that was probably the trickiest navigation and driving day for us. a lot of the rest of the course was dirt roads and then dirt trails. And then some rocky dirt trails with, some washouts, some really wash outy spots that are just like, you’re crossed, you’re going across where the water is like coming down a huge alluvial fan and you’re just like going across wash [00:54:00] after wash after wash.
We’re just like so bumpy all day. That’s where we ruined the shocks. But , none of it is so technical. The goal of the event is that it is not so technical that you can’t do it in a car basically outta your driveway with some upgraded tires. And that it’s not going to put you in any dangerous driving situations really.
I would say the most. , precarious spots we were in would be slope related, so some really steep ascent and descent on some kind of single, vehicle track trails through some of these hills. But, and there were, some rocks and that kind of stuff, but never, it’s not like rock crawling.
You don’t need a buggy for this. There’s still skill involved and especially if you’re driving an older car that where you’re trying to really preserve the car. You know, Like you can just bash your car through all of these things.
But if you are doing it with, some throttle control and good line choice, you can really preserve your car and your, internal balance,[00:55:00]
Carling: choice,
Jenna: your brain juices, whatever, so that you’re not rattling around in the car all
Liza: modern cars
Have really squashy squishy suspension and they have traction control computers that, you know, especially a four wheel drive vehicle, like a modern Land Rover or a modern Jeep or a modern Toyota.
Well, a 30 year old Land Rover doesn’t have that. it is much more mechanical. My vehicle has a center locking differential, but other than that we have high gear, low gear, and a center locking diff and that’s it. And that is, I think where Jenna shines in the rebel as being a very competent driver, is that her technique is excellent. To watch her drive. And a lot of our friends that we made on the rebel, who we often would convoy with on certain parts of the event, would say the same thing to watch Jenna.
It was about line choice and throttle control and just, she treats it. [00:56:00] It’s almost like watching a really masterful dancer. Choreograph. It’s like learning when to come off the clutch and add the throttle and then, pick the line and go up this way and then give it some more. And nice and even, and she treats it.
It’s, it really is a beautiful thing to watch.
Jenna: Well, and it goes the flip way too. Liza is like a. Competent and thorough and meticulous and almost like surgical navigator, like she is so accurate with plotting those points and like really carefully, like determining the distance that we’re gonna be like based on the mapping distance and then tracking it on our little terra trip computer.
But also being able to like do the quick math and compensate for, oh, actually nope, this is totally right. Okay, we’re gonna zero it here. Okay. Now that’s that. Totally. Like it checks out and, okay. It’s not gonna be this wash or that wash, even though there’s 17 trails coming in at this point.
It’s not this one. It’s that one. And like she’s just so [00:57:00] amazing at reading that map.
Liza: One of the things that I was really proud of was that I can look, a lot of people, they need the map to be facing the direction that they are, right? So if you’re going southbound, a lot of people will turn that. 180 degrees so that they’re always going up on the map. And I don’t have that. I can, we can be going southbound and I can look at the map and I can tell Janet, okay, we’re in 500 meters, we’re gonna take a left turn, which on my map would actually be my right because we’re go, et cetera, et cetera.
I can flip that in my head really well. And that ended up being an absolutely huge advantage to being able to just adjust on the fly and go. And yeah, I’m really excited about all these skills that we, didn’t know we had until we got out there and we crushed it.
Carling: That’s incredible. Are you gonna use the same vehicle next year?
Liza: Yeah, I think so. I think so. That’s we [00:58:00] have talked about, some other options. We’ve also talked about what we think is realistic for a 30, it’s gonna be a 31 year old vehicle this year. Is it possible to win this event in a 31 year old vehicle? I don’t know. I’m not sure. And the modern vehicles have some creature comforts that sure would be nice to have out there.
That definitely I think in terms of your stamina and in terms of your ability to get through the mental marathon of the event. However, I don’t know if they’re as much fun and I don’t know if they capture the spirit of what we love about running a classic defender. Both of us. Sort of classic vintage Land Rover enthusiasts. I have a brand new Land Rover. I could take my 2021 defender on this event and we’d have a great time.
And then we had a great sponsor a university at my husband’s alma mater actually sponsored us and they had student [00:59:00] designers design the rap and the graphics for our vehicle. And it was such a good looking vehicle. Like it just was so eye-catching out there. I’ll
Jenna: so photogenic.
Liza: so photogenic
Carling: It’s like Instagram worthy, I think, is
Liza: It really is.
Carling: And what was your team name? I feel like I didn’t even ask what your team name was.
Liza: we were Team 1 55, the full sale Dream team, full Sale University was our sponsor. And they had the title sponsorship banner, meaning they gave us enough money that they got to call us, whatever they wanted us to
Carling: And what if you had. Like a piece of advice or a warning or any words of motivation if anybody’s listening and they’re just like, I don’t know, is it, if it’s, if it piques their interest and they’re, they think they might wanna look into it, what would you tell somebody?
Jenna: up for the training, go do a training weekend, and you’ll decide right then and there whether it’s something they’re excited about, whether it’s something like the skills and the activities or [01:00:00] something you enjoy doing, whether there’s something that feel like you could learn or whether you’re just like, I hate this
Liza: I think women. Are not encouraged enough, especially later in life, to pursue the things that interest them.
And my advice would be if there is something that you are interested in that you wanna learn more about, and you’ve got this voice in your head saying, I could never do that, I can’t imagine ever doing that. We all start somewhere and I to that, I say bs, you can learn a new skill at 30, at 40, at 50, at 60, at 70.
And you just need somebody in your corner saying, heck yeah, that looks great. Go do that. Start by learning about it. Take a risk. Like I think more women need to be encouraged to step outside their comfort zone and try something new. And so many of the stories that you have on your podcast, Carlin, I listen to these people who, they reinvent [01:01:00] themselves halfway through their life and they go in a completely different direction and they have this life they never expected to have.
And it all comes down to taking that first initial step. And I think that’s what, that’s what the rebel rally was for us.
Carling: That’s amazing. I can’t thank you both so enough for sharing your story. I think it’s so interesting and yeah, I hope more people go check out like the event I’ll put links to the rebel rally. Are you gonna document it or did you, are you gonna start an Instagram account for it?
Liza: We did. So I have an Instagram account that kind of encompasses our team stuff called Overland Her Overland underscore her. And then we do post a bit to our personal Instagrams as well. And then also our husbands have a podcast called the Underpowered Hour that is all about Land Rovers.
And back in October we did an episode from the start line and we did an episode immediately after the next day after we got back [01:02:00] from the Rebel, we recorded
an entire episode that broke it?
down. We broke it down day by day, everything that we did. And they asked us all these questions about, okay, and then what happened?
And then where why were you guys stopped here for so long and whatnot.
Jenna: It was funny because they had been watching on the edge of their seats, like biting their nails, watching our little dot move around.
Liza: move around a map and they don’t have a lot of information as to what’s happening out there. They can just see our little dot moving with all the other competitors through
Jenna: Until it’s not
Liza: And yeah, if people wanna find out more, they wanna ask us questions, hit us up on social media. If you can’t tell, we love talking about the rebel. This has become a really big part of our identity in the last year.
Carling: as it should. You should wear it with so much pride. That’s so amazing.
Liza: And we met some incredible people out there too that have become lifelong friends
Carling: Oh, that’s so great. I love it. Okay, I’m gonna let you guys get back with your day. Thanks for taking time outta your [01:03:00] Saturday. I really
Liza: Thank you, and I love the show So happy to be on the show with you guys.
Carling: Thank
Jenna: Yep. Thanks.
Carling: All right. Have a good day.
Liza: Bye.
Carling: Bye.
Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode. I hope you found our conversation informative and entertaining. If you enjoyed this episode, please don’t forget to follow me on all my social media platforms. Share this podcast with your friends and leave a review@ratethispodcast.com slash I did not sign up for this.
Your support means the world to me. Join me next week when I talk with Teresa, who I’ve had on the podcast two other times in episode 98 and 114. This episode, we’re gonna be talking about some of the experiences navigating the lesbian dating world as a latent life lesbian, and choosing to create the community she needed.
If you want more interviews and exclusive content, don’t forget to join the patreon@patreon.com slash I did not sign up for this. Thank you so much and have an amazing week. [01:04:00]
I Did Not Sign Up For This- Podcast 