Following a brass band ceremonial departure, we struggled out of UB in dreadful traffic, resorting at times to the side road or even the wrong side of the road as the car got increasingly grumpy. It turned out (later) that the reason she was difficult to start (we had a delightful policeman help us get her a push start first thing having shown us how they pre-warm the cylinders by removing the spark plugs and igniting the fuel in the cylinder with a lighter!) and grumpy was because we were at 1500m above sea level, and the carbs needed a bit of a tune to richen them up a bit.
Once underway, we had about 120km of tarmac before we branched back off onto the dirt and gingerly headed north and then roughly west towards Untiin Brigarde campsite.
With about 100km to go to camp, we hit a marked gulley a bit too hard and then the car was going sideways. Turns out we had broken a leaf spring. As luck would have it, Andy Inskip in one of the sweep cars had just finished helping the Rolling Stones (Keith Weed and Richard Holmes) right their Pontiac, and were on our tails when it happened; Skip showed us how to gerry rig the broken spring to enable us to get to camp, and once there we were able (with the help of Dave) to strip the spring and replace the main spring with one of our spares. Turns out the springs we had put on were the one major error of judgement; we should have put much stronger ones on.
Link here to the You Tube video of the day
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Ashton & Giles welcome any visitors, support, and comments as we prepare for our Adventure !