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.

Can you believe this is the 200th blog post on our pokey little corner of the internet? If that isn't a good enough reason to write a post taking stock of where we are, our achievements and what is still to do, I don't know what is. So where are we? We have registered three cars for the event and have five of the six drivers sorted. Carl is still looking for his co-driver, but Lisa and I are completely invested in driving Team: Dirty Martin around Europe, as are Richie an

I stumbled across a website that creates cracking, print-ready map posters of any location in the world - handy if, say, you were doing a trip across Europe in a couple of months and wanted to create a poster commemorating the trip... It runs entirely in a browser and is powered by OpenStreetMap data, allowing me to search for any city and create my own detailed map with as much detail as I want, then pick from dozens of curated themes or build my own custom colour palette. A

After another night of scouring Booking.com, we have secured our apartments in Séte and San Sebastián. It wasn't easy; there was much discussion, changing of minds, and back-and-forth between the five of us, but we have settled on two locations that look really good. With the last places booked, we now have costs mapped out for the whole trip, and it is a pretty hefty bill! We estimate the fuel will cost us around £500 in total, a figure we roughly thought before signing up

After booking the bed and breakfast in Sète (that we may or may not be staying in - more of that HERE ), we moved on to San Sebastián. We had already scoped out a couple of properties, so this should have been a little easier to sort out. Something to factor in is that by this time we had got through a couple of bottles of wine, the thick end of a bottle of vodka/gin/spiced rum, and enough cans of beer to satisfy an away-day coach of football fans. It was noisy and disjoin

Another night, another session sat around a computer looking for places to stay on the continent that is located in the right part of town, have at least three bedrooms - ideally with ensuite facilities, and parking for three cars, making a heroic trek across Europe. Phew. It was noisy and disjointed, but we got it done. We are now booked into a charming place in Sète that fits the bill perfectly. It has three rooms, so we would effectively have the place to ourselves. It

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

We caught up with our other good friends, Tony and Julie, and asked them if they were interested in a jaunt to Monaco in a tiny city...

As we are keeping the cars, we need to bring them home, so we will have to make another trek back up France to the UK. Google Maps tells...