Though any road trip aspires to Hollywood-style hijinks, most just end up a neverending carousel of Weezer Blue album and pee-holding, and when you blow by Pea Soup Anderson's, the tears start to flow. Dry your eyes, young man, and join Rental Car Rally.

A backroads-mostly competitive road trip from SF to Tijuana in preferably a rented whip (but you can use whatever), RCR SF is the West Coast debut of last year's uber-successful inaugural rally, which dispatched a fleet of madcap NYers to the only place shadier than Mexico...Montreal. The skinny: teams of two or more (who're urged to flamboyantly costume themselves/their whip) depart from a secret TBA location on Friday at midnight and head South sans highways; covering as few miles as possible, they'll hit four backwoods checkpoints, including a dismantled roadside dinosaur that used to be a cigarette stand's mascot (hopefully she wasn't a pregosaurus). Two champs'll be crowned: a "Winnah & Champeen" team, determined by a combination of low mileage and overall costume/car style, with bonus points added for "verifiable run-ins with the law", and a "Style Champeen" team, determined by best team/car combo; standouts from last year include The Used Car Salesmen, who sported 'staches and polyester suits, and continually hawked their wheezing beater, and all-dude Team Knot, comprised of a groom, his bride, a priest, and a ringbearer -- who won the style prize because marriage is awesome...Knot!

Both winners receive the Rally's gold spray-painted gas pump trophy, with the Champeen also getting roughly $2000; on Wed night before the start, there'll be a kickoff party for all participants at Bloodhound with booze specials galore. Also free: at the starting line, the ten most-decked-out teams'll get mini Flip camcorders, ideal for documenting tears of joy when you're finally allowed to stop for a Pea.

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