Insurance documents arrived yesterday afternoon. Seat Marbella was taxed and is now totally road legal. So, Vaughn and I said goodbye to Sweethay Court and aimed for London to meet up with Seth and Jen. The Hedderwick’s we’ll see again tonight at the Mongol Rally Launch Party and again tomorrow at Hyde Park before leaving. Mr. H will be bringing an “official” valuation of both cars that will be declared to the Mongolian government for tax import tax purposes.

The drive from Taunton to London was about 150 miles and both cars drive well at 60-70 mph. About halfway through, Vaughn in the lead, we passed by Stonehenge. It was only 150 yards or so off to the left of the highway surrounded by people. It sits in the middle of a field on atop a small hill. Obviously I didn’t try hard enough to get his attention and we kept motoring along. Another 20 miles down the road he pulled off to fill up the tank. He never even saw it.

While stopped I decided to check the oil on the Marbella. Went to pull the dipstick and got more than I had bargained for. Dipstick and the sheath for it all came out in my hand. A few moments thought and a well placed wire tie temporarily solved the problem. Will likely seal that with a bit of RTV before setting out tomorrow.

Funny thing about European motor oil, the stuff is almost perfectly clear. Maybe a slight yellow hue to it. So it takes a few close looks at the dipstick just to figure out where the level is. Long story short everything seems to be okay so far.

London’s an interesting place to negotiate by car. We called the hotel to get direction from the expressway and that was almost totally useless. The guy on the phone kept saying “We have many different exits from the M3.” Eventually Vaughn got frustrated and told the guy to pick one and tell us how to get there. I’m not sure what the guy told us was correct. Ended up buying a London map at a gas station and figured it out from there.

Introduced Seth and Jen to the cars. There was a lot of laughing. We must have chosen well.

Woke up this morning to meet with a film crew from Harbinger Pro. We did some interviews in the hotel room. Why are you doing this? What are you taking with you? That kind of thing. The same guys will be filming the launch event tomorrow from Hyde Park. We’ll be doing some filming on our own during the drive and hopefully at the end something useful will come of it. Perhaps a Bad Colonies DVD a little later on down the trail.

As always, more later…

dominic

ps. European keyboards are different. Key layout and even key size is just not quite the same. Please pardon misspellings, I probably just hit the neighboring key. But I think I got most of them edited.

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