In which Sid and Doris set off for the luxury of doing a journey organised by someone else.
You may remember that we discussed the definition of “epic” journeys, and concluded that the journey need never try to be the hardest, furthest or most remarkable, it simply had to stretch you in some sort of way.
A further point to note then is that not all travel needs to be an epic journey. Sometimes it can simply be a fun thing to do, go to new or familiar places and meet new or familiar people. And so the end of September 2021 finds Sid and Doris on their way to the Channel Tunnel in the Mini, to take part in a car rally organised by Rally The Globe.
The event itself starts in Sanremo, on the northern Italian coast, and so there are basically two ways to get there – drive down, or pay someone else to transport the car and fly down. In these post-Brexit days option 2 has suddenly become much more expensive, and anyway Sid and Doris are now People of Leisure so a pleasant 3-4 day drive looked most attractive. As it did to several other people – 12 cars full of other people in fact, and so we find ourselves on a mini pre-rally meeting up in Epernay on Tuesday night.
Motorway distances are not trivial in the Mini, what with being about 2% of the size of your average lorry and with a comfortable cruising speed of 60-65mph, so we set off on Monday afternoon for a night in Calais to give our eardrums a rest and have a quiet diner a deux before the brouhaha starts. About 3 miles down the M11 we overtake the CARS transporter lorry which almost certainly has several of our future fellow rally cars inside. We wave up at the driver – yoo hoo we are down here Mr CARS!!! – and he waves down at us.
Seamlessly through the Chunnel and about a mile away from the hotel, with the scent of garlic-flavoured steak sauce already starting to waft towards us, a much less lovely smell starts. Ha ha says Sid, someone else is having a bad problem with their brakes or electrics. Oh no, says Doris, it is us, as a coil of smoke wafts up from somewhere in the car.
Much athletic leaping around, brandishing of our rally-sized fire extinguisher and ripping out all the carpets looking for the short, and the problem is eventually traced to the fuel pump in the boot, which seems to have suffered a spontaneous meltdown. Satisfied we know what the problem is and that we have a spare working fuel pump, we walk the final mile to the hotel and the steak etc etc yum yum.
During a somewhat uneasy night we make a shopping list of bits and bobs to help fix the problem, which a local quincaillerie helpfully supplies, once we bridge the technical language barrier (“a plug for two wires, no, smaller than that, no, flatter than that” etc).
Back to the car the next morning and we discover our horror that fuel pump B is significantly different to fuel pump A, and in particular requires larger fittings. Sid sources them from a local plumbing shop (well in fact the 4th one he went to, thanks to a very helpful French taxi driver) and Andrew and Gina Young, fellow Epernay-bound travellers stop to help. And this is just as well because larger fittings B would not fit into smaller fuel pipes A until Andrew uses his farmer’s hands and strength (and some lubrication from a dose of lip salve) to ensure that the ugly sister’s feet will fit into Cinderella’s glass slipper.
We are Offski again, hooray for rally solidarity, and on our way to Epernay. There is a song in there possibly.