In which Sid and Doris award themselves the Best Crew with a New Gearbox award and set off for home.
The penultimate day of the rally sees much action on gravel tracks out in the hills and villages. The locals have the fun of seeing the rally, the crews enjoy messing about with cars and seeing how life is here. The DNA is broadly the same, the lives very different.
Sid and Doris work quite hard to do well on the regularities while not working the car much on the tests. As we come down towards the coast the roads are busier and so regularities are decided by who came around a corner to find a motorised wheel-barrow or who found a tractor. S and D are quite lucky.
The Ramada in Tekirdag is a proper hotel for local people. Dinner is the same plate of mezzes, salad and grilled meat. Breakfast offers many of the evening dishes again, just right for the clientele all the rest of the year. Skippy has chips and Coke for breakfast so he’s happy.
Sunday, the last day, has one regularity on a main road and then we are onto back roads to take us around round to Tekirdag again. Many people wonder why not have the regularity on the return road with no traffic.
And now it is down into Istanbul and the finish at the Shangri La, which is a proper rich tourists’ 
hotel. The Finish arch is inflated and everyone is applauded; the first, second and third from prewar and post war are brought through last and good use is made of some horrid sparkling wine. Finishers’ awards are given out. S and D are last in the results but have finished.
The final dinner and prize giving is aboard a Bosporous party boat. S is very chary of a party you can’t leave. The evening starts well as all mingle on deck as we spot palazzos along the shore. The waterway is chaotic with ferries, party boats, local motor boats (no sail boats) and freighters to and from the Black Sea. (Turkey has just impounded a Russian chartered freighter believed to be carrying stolen Ukrainian wheat.)
We all love seeing Gerard’s still photos and portraits. Later we see some of the video footage with a very good few seconds of the Alvis cocking a wheel.
Many prizes are given but none for S and D, which makes D a bit sad after all that Spirit of the Rally thing.
At about 10.00 Sid has had enough and is willing the skipper to get back to the Kadikoy landing. But he has been booked until 10.45 and only has that slot on the dock for a touch and go landing. And that is the rally done. Now on to the S and D adventure of driving home.
The best ingredient of the Shangri La breakfast is sitting looking over the Bosphorus. S and D think this will be their final visit, there being so many places yet unseen.
Driving out of Istanbul on Monday for Igoumentsou and the ferry to Italy involves a great deal of ‘simply reverse the above procedure’. The Istanbuli’s driving is pathetically competitive and anti-social. Maybe if men were banned from driving?