Judgement Day (and Stephen’s birthday)
19 JulThis is it! What’s done is done. Up at 7:00, the car is loaded, and we’re on the way to Hyde Park. After completing some registration formalities, a couple of hours chatting to our supporters, and a few moments eating cake for Stephen’s Birthday, we’re on our way out of London...past Buckingham Palace to wave to the queen, around in circles for a while, and then on the road to Folkestone. We arrived well early, and were moved forward to an earlier train. Below are some pictures of the launch. My teammates have some pictures of some of the rally’s more crazy entrants, so we’ll put them up later.
Tim’s new boss, Peter Hawthorn, showed up for the launch as well. Special thanks to Peter who has let us use his workshop in Wimbledon for our fabrication work. Peter has a new fabrication business called Very Metal.
...and here is Stephen chilling next to the car on the Eurotunnel train, bound for Calais.
This is Gilly Bear, one of our fluffy toys, illustrating the border from France to Belgium.
We shared the driving around, and soon we arrived in Brussels. Unfortunately we missed the turn for the ring road, and drove straight into the centre. The road was massive though, and we were confident it would go through to the other side of town. That was until we ran into the town fair, which had been set up on the main road with no diversion. Half an hour later we gave up and stopped for dinner. Good pizza, although we did somehow get charged 8 euros for a bottle of water! We asked the waiter for directions (out of Brussels, not to Mongolia) and were overheard by a lovely lady, who later approached us saying she had friends in Kazakhstan and Russia.
After escaping Brussels we drove to Liege, on the way leaving the motorway to drive through the Belgian villages of St Truiden and Heers. We pushed on into the night, stopping about 30km’s out of Koln in a motorway parking area. Since the weather was good (and we were pretty tired!), we slept under the stars. In the morning we discovered that what we thought was a cloud was a power station quenching cloud, but no side effects to speak of yet.
Miles from Hyde Park 317
