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

After the official rally finishes, we head along the coast to Séte for a couple of days. But what do we know about the place beyond the fact that it looks achingly beautiful in the pictures I've seen? Let's dive a little deeper. Sète is a port city on the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault department in the Occitanie region. It sits on a narrow strip of land between the sea and the vast Étang de Thau - a brackish lagoon - giving it a genuinely distinctive geography, almost

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 reading the new Rally Bible and looking at the route on the map, we have another couple of points of interest to add to the journey, a dam and a church. Intrigued? Let me elaborate. We are already stopping at points of interest along the route between stages of the event, like visiting Bastogne to see the World War II memorial commemorating the Battle of the Bulge, a turning point in the war. But looking at the Rally Bible, there is a chance to visit a dam in Switzer

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

I was watching some old Top Gear episodes recently. I came across the episode where the presenters chose their favourite hot hatchbacks and were sent to Italy to complete several challenges (Series 17, Episode 2, if you are interested). Clarkson rocked up in the Citroen DS3 Racing, Hammond championed the Fiat 500C Abarth, and May made the case for the Renaultsport Clio Cup. They attempted to navigate their way around baffling Italian towns and take part in a scavenger hunt

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

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

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...

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

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

There are so many moving parts to this trip that my head is spinning. We definitely need to book hotels and trains/ferries. We need to decide if we are having a week in a villa, find out who can make it, and then book that. Then there are the cars; they all need checking to ensure they will actually make the trip before we get busy with the decorations. Then there are the drivers. Lisa and I are definitely in - barring any disasters at home. Carl is definitely in, but do

Looking through the Pre-Rally Bible, I stumbled across something called Auto-Train, a service in which your vehicle hitches a ride on a rail-based car transporter while you travel in style to your destination. The service ran from Nice to Calais, which would have been an absolute boon for our trip. Notice I used 'ran' instead of 'runs'. The service to Calais ceased in 2017, with the link to Paris ceasing in 2019. Loading the car up in Nice and then letting the train take t

Following on from The Great British Innuendo Tour , I stumbled across a map of places in Northern Ireland that we should definitely add...