This section covers all the Ws: who, where, why, what, when, and, erm, how. 
A daily record of the plans made and the decisions taken. 
Click on the articles below for the latest news.

We know where we are visiting on the trip, have a rough estimate of how many miles we will cover, and know what public transport we will be using, so we can start calculating the cost of our epic journey. Although we have booked some hotels, we still have a couple more to do. Therefore, there is no final cost for accommodation yet, so I'll keep that summary for another post. We have settled on the train to take us on to mainland Europe, and the ferry to bring us back. Based

So Ellis might be joining us on the trip. Well, an effigy of Ellis might be, anyway! While speaking with Sarah about the fundraising we were considering in Ellis' name, she said we should take him with us, which freaked me out. I was thinking there would be a tub of ashes or something, then she produced a little cuddle pillow thing with his face on it. Sarah had created a pillow with Ellis' face on it - something he would have hated, apparently, as his head looks massive!

I did a bit of browsing for gear today. I stumbled across the Porsche Martini Racing store, which was an experience. Adding the P word to anything instantly hikes the price. Want a branded t-shirt with the motor manufacturer and the sponsor on it? £50 that mate. Ouch. To be fair, the t-shirt was cracking, with the iconic striped pattern covering the whole garment and both brands' logos printed in white on the front, and the Porsche logo on the back. £50 is too much, but

With hotels booked for the official rally, the extended route locked in, and everyone committed to the trip (barring disasters), it felt like an appropriate time to let Sarah know that we were thinking of using the trip to raise money for New Start, the charity that looked after her husband, and our friend, Ellis. I'll be honest, I was nervous telling Sarah in case I was bringing back sad memories, or she had fallen out with the charity or thought we were being ghouls. I men

This post isn't about some rubbish film starring a fading Hollywood light, made on the cheap and deemed not good enough to be shown at the cinema. No, this is a cute little video showing the scale of the drive ahead of us. Putting names in a list is one thing; seeing them mapped out is quite another. Click on the video below for a peek at our journey (it might take a minute to load). The Full Pull...

Discussing the trip with my colleagues at work, one of them casually asked if I was fitting a dashcam to record the trip and add a layer of safety. I hadn't really given it any serious thought, but now it was in my head. I know nothing about dash cams other than that they are expensive and can be a pain to fit neatly. So I hit the internet and asked it to come up with some decent suggestions for an affordable, 4K unit, preferably with a rear camera too. I checked Auto Expre

We have just about decided on our trip; we know where we are going as part of the organised rally, and we have almost settled on the route home after Monte Carlo and Nice. If things go to plan, the whole trip will take 12 days and cover around 2,200 miles. Our current itinerary: Wed 10th - Driving from Liverpool to Namur Thur 11th - Day off Fri 12th - Driving from Namur to Freiburg Sat 13th - Driving from Freiburg to Menaggio Sun 14th - Driving from Menaggio to Nice Mon 15th

We have checked the ferry timetables and will be departing Bilbao at 13:00 on 20th June, arriving in Portsmouth at 17:30 the following day. It takes about 5 hours to travel from Portsmouth to Liverpool, so we will be home late Sunday night. We will be travelling on the Galica, the blurb says it is the first of the Brittany Ferries designed especially for routes to Spain. The Galicia showcases some of the very best of Spain with décor inspired by the beautiful region of northe

When Carl was arounf the other night I showed him the Sparco bag I'd found, which is both massive and fits in with the rally aesthetic. He agreed that it is precisely the sort of thing we need, and that we should be able to fit all of our clothes and toiletries in, and that it will fit perfectly in the back of our little Abarths. Lisa saw it and said it wasn't girly enough, so it was out. Back to the drawingboard for us. The difficult search for a large, pink, soft-shell b

With the apartment in Nice booked, that is where the official journey ends and our own path is forged. We discussed at length what the next steps were, banding ideas around, looking for the best way to get from the south of France back to Blighty. The direct route is right up the centre of France, up to Lyon, up to Paris, over to Calais, through the tunnel and bosh, back home. But what if we didn't take the direct route? I've been thinking about heading to northern Spain a

By this point, we are all very much on the way to being drunk, with the exception of Richie, who was on some mad, low alcohol beer, as he knew he would need a clear head for the award presentation he was attending the following day. His relative sobriety was a massive help as we headed to Nice on our hotel booking journey. Like the first day, we decided to spread the trip over two days to give us some time to decompress. As we were staying a couple of days in Nice, we compl

We were on a roll now, another round of drinks was consumed, the noise level went up, and people started to get visibly giddy as we had two hotels in the bag. The next stop on the route is Menaggio on the banks of Lake Como, and we knew this was going to be a wallet-busting stop! We ignored the Bust Rallies Bible this time. We knew exactly what we wanted and how much we were willing to pay. What we found was that Menaggio was a very popular spot for tourists in mid-June -

After another round of drinks, it was back into Booking.com to check out available digs, this time in the German city of Freiburg. Again, we dipped into the Bust Rallies Bible to see what they suggested and then completely ignored them! Namur is an old town which came to prominence in Roman times and is filled with quaint old buildings. Freiburg is much bigger, and the city centre is modern, so it was unlikely we would find another chateau to stay in, which turned out to be

We had a nice little get-together on Saturday night: a few friends, a few drinks and the daunting task of booking all the hotels for the trip. All we had to do was agree on four hotels that satisfied five people's individual needs!!! Straightforward, right? Actually, it was pretty painless. We first had to decide what day we were leaving, which changed from Thursday to Wednesday. This was to give us an extra day in Namur to decompress after the 8-hour drive from Liverpool

The new year has seen Carl ramp up the work on Bert, his beautiful black Abarth. The little fella was in for a service and MOT. What he left with was £1200 worth of work! Ouch! As part of the MOT inspection, the mechanic found a few jobs that needed to be done, including the strut top mounts on both sides, the wishbones on both sides, and the front discs and pads. The good news was that the parts were relatively cheap; the bad news was that the labour charges were crippli

It has been a minute since I've done any website maintenance. There are lots of little changes that need to be made. Tiny things like updating the copyright year to 2026, all the way up to removing the Fauxrrari Abarth from the VEHICLES section (boo!), but adding Team: Daisy Racing (yay!) I've also got geeky and adjusted the spacing on the VEHICLES and ROUTE sections so they fit better. I've also expanded the opening post on the WELCOME page to confirm that the cars hav

While browsing for some Martini Racing bits ahead of the summer trip, I stumbled across this beauty. Distinctive yet minimal, this looks the mutt's nuts. This then sent me down a rabbit hole of looking for VW T2 vans on eBay, and the results were initially surprising. For a few grand, I could pick up a '70s T2 with around 50000 miles on the clock - result. But, in the immortal words of Prince, "all that glitters aint gold". After examining the pictures a little closer, th

I don't know, you wait months for new content, and then, just like buses, three articles arrive at once! If you have been paying attention, you will know that R&R have a new car for the trip and are thinking about ideas for decoration and theme. I sent them a link to the article the other day, and Richie responded with an AI-generated image of a Q2 in blue with full rally markings. The livery included their granddaughter's name and the day she was born as a number - very f

Now that R&R have their car for the journey, we need to think about a theme for them. Initially, they played around with the idea of buying a Ford Transit and making it look like the A-Team van, topped off with Richie in an inflatable dinosaur costume to represent Hannibal Smith's penchant for working as an extra in films, and Rachel dressed as B.A. Baracus (the idea of her crossing international borders in disguise as a black man didn't faze her). Then Richie bought a black

The tale of the third car in our convoy has had more twists than the Gotthard Pass. Remember when R&R were supposed to use an Abarth ; then, when more comfort was required, there was tongue-in-cheek talk of a funeral car? Next, a van was suggested to help with the fancy-dress part of the trip, before they settled on a Ford Kuga , which was then potentially swapped for a campervan . Yeah, well, all that is in the past. The Abarth/funeral car/van/Kuga/campervan is dead! L