0007 A weekend working on the car

13^th/14^th May 2017

Some ugly truths revealed ?  And a party !

Ashton & Joe getting serious

Ashton arranged his busy work / car schedule to allow time to come up to Queensland for the weekend so we could take a serious look at the car, and finalise our spare parts order so it gets on the way soonest.  On Friday evening we had a couple of hours to sit down and go through some of the stuff, but work started in earnest on Saturday morning.   Fortunately the weekend was quite poor weather, so we weren’t distracted to go surfing or anything silly !

0006 Searching for spare parts in England

24^th – 29^th April 2017

And a side trip through Wales !

View over London from The Shard

We had been planning this trip to England for some time – It was my old (!) school chum John’s 70^th birthday, and we had booked the trip many months ago because I had planned to be there for his 60^th in 2007, but that was when I was having my bout with throat cancer, and I wasn’t able to travel.   So there was no way we were going to miss his 70^th !!   And now that our foray in the 2019 Peking to Paris (going to call it P2P from now on) is planned, it was an ideal opportunity to take some time to hunt for sources of the spare parts we need for the Healey.  Our search was to take us up to Pontefract near Leeds, so we set aside a week.

0005 It's serious now - we are on the entry list....

10th March 2017

 Yep, no sooner had Giles posted that we were starting to get serious, than we really had to. We received notification from Annette at the ERA that our application had both been received and was successful, so now we swing into full steam ahead......

Planning for this event requires both a huge number of conversations, and, as we are discovering, a lot of decision-making. Mostly in a vacuum, as even with some endurance rally experience in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close to this event.

0004 Getting started

6th March 2017.
We finally get to officially submit our entry.

Competitors in the Endurance Rally Association events are "invited" to enter, and selected based on past experience, your car, or if you have an interesting story.  But first of all, you have to register an "Expression of Interest" to compete in the rally. This we did in mid-September 2016, and our "Interest" was registered, with a promise to send us an Invitation to Enter early in 2017.