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.

Dear Diary, Today was the big day, the start of the rally, which meant putting all the graphics onto the car…a task made more difficult by the incessant drizzle which soaked us and left a slippery film all over the car. Eventually we got the job done, and the car looked boss. I’d arranged for a photographer to meet us and take some glamour shots. The rest of the team were gobsmacked that I’d done such a thoughtful thing for us all. Lisa was even more gobsmacked when the ph

Dear Diary, On day two we decided to walk into town which was only a mile or so away. What we couldn’t see from the map was that it was also a mile or so down in altitude - our hotel was at the top of a massive rocky spur that dominates the city. We made it down the trail, passing people coming the other way in full hiking gear, but ended up on the wrong side of the river which gave us the chance to explore the city before heading over back over to the right side with a deli

Dear Diary, We have arrived in Namur, although it was far from straightforward. Carl got a puncture as we were about to leave our street. Do you know how hard it is to get a tyre fixed at 7 AM on a Wednesday in Liverpool? Thankfully, he managed it. The M6 was rammed at the Winwick Interchange, and by the time we joined the M25, the weather was biblical. Horizontal rain, coming down in sheets as thick as lead, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Probably not what Rache

The final booking has been made. We are now officially booked onto Le Shuttle at Folkestone. This took so much longer than I thought it would. I assumed we would pick a train and sort it out, but choosing our departure time has taken a long time. We seemed to have been discussing this on various nights outs for months so I eventually did some back of a fag packet maths and put it to the group. Leave Liverpool at 07:00, stop at a service station on the other side of Birmin

Yesterday was a big day for us. Not only did Lisa and I get the 'glamour' shots with our little car, but we also managed to race past £1,000 in donations for New Start. A THOUSAND POUNDS! Amazing. It is no exaggeration to say that we are all blown away by the generosity shown already by friends, family and colleagues. We only really set up the JustGiving page to link back to this website and to show New Start that we were serious about raising money for them. It wasn't

We received an email this morning from Bust Rallies HQ confirming that they are sending out our welcome packs, including the documentation we need to complete before we register in Namur. I put the details in our Rally Ravers WhatsApp group for Richie, since he didn't book and wouldn't receive the email, and he started going through the links. He casually said, "This is quite interesting. I wasn't aware of all the permits and stickers," which triggered something in me. I me

I'm getting increasingly twitchy as time goes on, worried that I have missed something. I knew we needed to fill out an immigration form before boarding the ferry at Bilbao. I also knew that I had to organise one of those 'free A&E cards' for abroad, but wasn't sure what either was or how to do it. A quick online search and we are sorted. For travel to or from the UK, it’s now compulsory to provide Advance Passenger Information (API). This information is required by the U

I mentioned the idea of getting a 'tour' t-shirt for us all to wear during the rally in an earlier post. Rachel read it and thought it was a great shout, as did Carl, because I think it was his idea in the first place! I'm not a designer, but I don't need to be now that A.I. is with us and doing all the donkey work for us, so I fired up Claude and entered the following prompt: "Please create a design that can be printed on the back of a t-shirt detailing a road trip we are d

While scouring the Internet looking for more stuff I don't really need, I spied a hysterical headline on the Liverpool Echo website. This is not an unusual event; their whole schtick seems to be just clickbait bobbins these days. They are not alone in this, to be fair, it is the state of online media these days, but that is a discussion for another day. So the headline was 'Anyone heading to France warned of new €500 fines from this month'. Well done, Neil Shaw, Assistant E

Now that we have added Spain to the list of countries we will be visiting as part of our trip, I thought it was sensible to dig into the quirks of driving in the country, even though it will be a relatively short part of the route. Here are some of the key characteristics that make driving in Spain unique: The Rules That Catch People Out Reflective jacket - you must carry one (ideally two for driver and passenger) and, crucially, you must put it on before getting out of the c

Now that we have the stops on our trip nailed down, I've handled a bit of website admin and added the additional stops to the 'Route' section of the site, since it suddenly stopped at Nice before. Now I've extended the route after the final Rally stop in Nice. I've added the Nice to Séte leg, the Séte to San Sebastián leg, the San Sebastián to Bilbao leg, and the Portsmouth to Liverpool leg to the list, too - more legs than a pantomime horse! I've also created a page detaili

After Séte our next stopover is San Sebastán in northern Spain. But what do we know about the city that is home to Real Sociedad and a world-renowned culinary scene? San Sebastián is the capital of Gipuzkoa province in the Basque Country of northern Spain, sitting right on the Bay of Biscay just 20km from the French border. It has a population of around 190,000, but its cultural footprint is far larger than that figure suggests. It's compact, walkable, beautiful, and widely c

While working out our route, we realised that we kinda go past Lourdes and decided to make our own pilgrimage. But what do we know about the place beyond the fact that coachloads of Christians made the trip there from Liverpool in the 80s? Lourdes is a small town of around 14,000 people nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees in south-west France. It sits alongside the Gave de Pau river, with mountains rising dramatically around it. Despite its modest size, it receives aroun

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