Polar Challenge Blog

Well up at eight this morning and first job was to fix the leaking seal in the top of my fuel tank. This was a quick and easy repair as I just dropped the left hand side of the tank and then fitted some instance gasket to both sides of the seal and refitted. This did the job and all was sorted.

The next job was to fix Rory’s flat tyre Jeff put in some tyre repair stuff in then used my compresser to inflate the wheel all seemed to be holding so after a quick shower we set of for the fuel station.

Fist problem was the tyre on Rory’s Bond Bug was flat by the time we got there so with the Robin to the rescue I removed one of my two spare wheels and we fitted this to the bug then off we went.

I plan was to drive to a half way point which was Munster then have lunch. The journey went well and with Elvis leading the pack we got to Munster in Germany for 13:30. We then found a really nice outside cafe where we had some refreshments. After looking at the prices for the food we thought better of that and so went back to the cars and pulled in at the garage to fuel up once again. The tank was half full but as we stopped it seemed daft not to. We also brought some food Elvis picked up some pop noodles so if we could not find a food place at the camp site then we could at least have more than a Mars bar.

Things seemed to be going really well till we hit road works and realised that three bugs were missing. As we were going though the road works we could not stop so ourselves and Richard (the only bug that was now with us drove though and pulled over to the hard shoulder to try and find what had happened. Richard managed to get Jeff on the phone to be told that Rory had got another puncture (this time in the other wheel) and Ivan’s engine had stopped and for us to carry on and pull in at the first parking point.

So we got there and waited for about twenty minutes and Rory turned up now sporting two standard Reliant wheels (a far cry from his alloys).Then after another 30 miniutes Jeoff and Ivan turned up. Jeff had managed to hot wire Ivan’s car to get it going so with out stoping his car we carried on to the camp site at Bremen.

Safe at the camp site (How we would of found it with out Rory’s sat nav is beyond me) and what a nice place this is. All the German people here came out to look at these five strange cars coming on to the site then out of nowhere comes the owner with five beers in hand and a big smile. He then brought out a mains lead so we can charge all our batteys and even more beer much to the delight of all the others except me. But then he brought me an OJ.

So we set up the tents then me armed with my muti meter and screw driver attacked Ivan’s bug to find what had gone wrong. It turned out that the cable from the ignition to the coil had broke so I routed in a new cable and all was then well.
As the football was coming on they cook our tea for us real quick and we all had three eggs, chips and gerkins which was well received.
As it was Ivan’s 50 bithday Jeff had brought a cake over with him so we all signed his card and gave him his cake which was very nice.
But the best was a chap thats staying here brought us all a round of drinks as he drives a Trabant.

We are just chilling now and we soon be off to bed as we have a long day tomorrow and need to get two punchers fixed for Rory.

Geoff

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 10:36 pm and is filed under The Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.