This is our trip as experienced by the copilot:

 

We've really done it. We started Friday evening at 8:30 p.m., drove all night through Germany, Luxembourg, France. Boarded the SeaFrance ferry boat in Calais at 8:20a.m. on Saturday morning. Reached Dover at around 10:00 a.m.

A sulfury smell during a fuel refill break made me open the hood. Nice fumaroles evaporating out of the battery refill caps. Popped off the caps and found the cells as dry as a Brighton pier pole during ebb tide. Two liters of destilled water cured the problem and on we went... All I've seen of England are foggy motorways.

We arrived at Christchurch at 1:30 p.m. and called Gary from Doosters Inc. to pick us up. He arrived five minutes later in a very low, very loud and very raw Rod called "The Trackster" and piloted us to his workshop. There she stood, '32 front rails welded to a rectangular tube frame, a chopped fibreglass Model A pick-up cabin with a sedan back wall. I-beam axle in front, solid axle with ladder-bars in the rear. A Rover V8 with automatic was put on the motor mounts and a spun aluminium gas tank behind the cabin to show everything fits nicely.

Great.

I asked Gary what he would call it, a coupe, a tudor or what. He said "This is what we would call a >modified<.." I named her "Miss Sophie" and when speaking of the car during the way home we always used that name. I guess she will keep it... We hung around the shop taking pictures, video filming, talking. Phil paid the balance. The engine and transmission came out of the car. We put the car on the trailer, they closed the shop at 4:00 p.m. We went to a Travel Inn motel. Gary paid the motel bill and left. He had to reject our invitation to drink a beer with us, because he has to little children and his wife died five years ago and he had no baby sitter for the evening. We took our dinner in a pizza hut nearby, drank two cans of beer each and were sound asleep at 10:00 p.m.

Got up at 6:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Tried to start the Volvo but didn't get the engine running. Opened the hood again, pulled out the spark plug wires, gave the contacts a healthy shot of contact oil spray, plugged them in again and "vrouumm" the Swedish mill came alive. Phil said: "Thank God I have an automotive engineer with me..." At 7:00 we were on the road again. A foggy misty white hell of motorways. 11:20 we were in Dover. Fog was so thick you could not even see the famous white cliffs. The 11:00 ferry was gone so we took breakfast at the port. The way home was an endless challenge of fog, icy roads, snow fall and lorries overtaking us because we were crawling up the slopes with 60 kilometers per hour.

Monday morning at 3:30 a.m. we reached our snow covered barn near Wolnzach, put Miss Sophie in her new home and I fell out of Phil's car and into my house at 5:00 a.m.

 

Cool wenn man Montags ausschlafen kann...