The 24hr getaway.

We took off from Genova in the rather early morning hours *yawn*. The first waypoint was Monaco where we wanted to do the Monaco Grand Prix circuit. We aimed to show the world what an amazing racing machine our car really is. Unfortunately we could not break the land speed record as the police came and put an end to our devious plans. We were quite innocently parked by the casino plotting the gps-coordinates (and for world domination) when they showed up. They told us that if we wanted to do any “funny stuff” we should have applied to the city months ago. We had not, so we were forced to drive off.

We went on to a quick stop in Nice since it is such a nice place and pushed on towards Barcelona, where we had hotel reservations. We had somewhat loose plans to push on a little further than Barcelona though. We even had plans to go all the way to Malaga where we wanted to depart Europe by ferry. We pushed on rather hard. Somewhere – late in the evening we realized that we were leaking coolant again. It was a radiator hose that we had recognized as something that might become a problem™ - something we needed to get changed in Malaga. It was the little hose that could not. We went through our big bag of hose-mysteries that we had gotten from the guys in Nowy Sacz and we hit paydirt! A hose that fit our needs perfectly – with the exact 90 degree angle we needed. After changing this hose we are pretty sure that we will not have any problems with our radiator hoses. *knock on wood*

The rest of the night was really rather uneventful - actually so uneventful that our Garmin GPS tried to make it more eventful for us. It sent us off the highway and into nice cities like Valencia – which Per could tell me was a really beautiful place, with great architecture, nice streets and some 25 stoplights to stop and enjoy the scenery at. And instead of taking the flatish route along the coast it took us up into the mountains with a lot of climbs and descents – perfect for our gearbox.

At nine in the morning we were in Malaga. We wanted to get a little sleep in the car – tired from the night of driving. We pulled into the parking lot of a shopping mall and drove under several car-shade-roof-thingies – our antenna hitting them all. As we came to a full stop and out of the car we realized that we only had a clearance of some 5cm to our coffin.

The day in Malaga was rather uneventful. We got our shirts dry cleaned and when Kristian went over to the drycleaners to pick them up he was told that my black shirt was not done and that he could get it “manjana” there was no way to get it cleaned or not. So he gave up. You will be missed in Africa Black Beauty.
The other teams came and joined us at the ferry docks. The MI6 also caught up too – we all slept in longue chairs on the ferry – envying the Norwegian team Froland who had gotten a cabin. Lucky bastards.