Check-in was 5:45 a.m. on a Sunday.

Liz took one look at that and said no thanks. Smartest decision anyone in our house made all weekend.

So it was me and the Lizard, my 2020 911 Carrera 4S, with the wipers running from start to finish.

And yes, the plate on the Lizard says DA SKIPR. The cars get names, the plates go nautical. We spend a good part of every year on a sailboat. Try to keep up.

The destination was Urban Deck north of Blue Ridge. From the RaceTrac on Stacy Road in Fairview, it’s 23 miles away as the crow flies.

Maverick PCA took 54.

The crow can keep its shortcut.

Our Fall Tour wound through Fairview, Lucas, Lowry Crossing, New Hope, Verona and Blue Ridge on the sort of North Texas back roads most people drive past without giving them a second thought. Their loss.

Wayne and Laura Hutton ran lead and set the pace. I ran sweep, which turned out to be convenient because the Porsche ROADS app took several miles to wake up. Apparently 7 a.m. was early for it too.

Until then, I had an arrow, a distance and a whole club’s worth of taillights disappearing through the spray.

The rain never really let up. Neither did the route.

There’s something particularly good about these roads in lousy weather. Speeds come down, concentration goes up, and suddenly roads you’ve driven before feel completely different. Rainy back roads are also a pretty convincing argument for the “4” in C4S.

Then we reached Climax.

Literally.

Climax is a tiny unincorporated community around FM 1377 and FM 2756. According to my GPX track, we were 38.84 miles into the drive when we passed through it.

Which meant we still had about 15½ miles to go.

We kept right on driving.

From there the route carried us north through Verona, onto FM 545, through Blue Ridge and eventually toward SH 78 and Desert. The rain finally gave up just before we arrived, which was considerate of it after spending the previous 50-something miles trying to wash the Lizard.

Urban Deck has a Blue Ridge mailing address, but the checkered flag on our route sat in Desert near the SH 78/SH 121 intersection. It’s a new venue with plenty of room for a parking lot full of wet Porsches, and breakfast tasted considerably better after taking the long way there.

More important, the tour and breakfast proceeds went to Wipe Out Kids’ Cancer. That’s a pretty good reason to set an alarm before dawn and spend a rainy Sunday morning chasing Porsche taillights across Collin County.

Special thanks to Randy Luckenbill and Jeff Wheeler for putting the Fall Tour together, Wayne and Laura for leading us through the rain, and everyone who handled check-in, radios, groups and the other little jobs required to get a bunch of Porsches from Fairview to breakfast in one piece.

Same time next fall.

Liz will probably still say no.