Kevin and Liam's story

4000miles, 12 Countries, 12 Days, 1 Eclipse

It must have been a good night down the pub, since I can't remember when I said I'd go to Romania to see the solar eclipse. It seemed nice and easy at the time - ride to Romania, see the eclipse, ride back again.

As the time for departure grew nearer the scale of the task became apparent, Jeremy had planned a route for us all to abuse & the ferry's were booked so there was no backing out. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the full 3 week trip and so was on the foreshortened 12day version. The rest of the group set off on their ferry and it was now down to me and Liam to make our way to Italy to meet them, 'in a bar in Villa Santina, sometime on Saturday'. With the addition of mobile phones and a couple of GPS's it was a guaranteed disaster.

What follows is a rambling tale of our adventure prompted mainly by notes from the journal I'd kept of the journey.

4/8/99

We were due on the 21:15 ferry from Dover to Calais and so being all organised I left work at about 17:30 to give me plenty of time to get there and ready... only to arrive in Dover 18:45 with a few hours to spare. I think whoever told it me would take at least 2 hours had been riding a snail. So I pitched up in a MacD's car park to while away the hours watching spotty yoofs do wheelies on their souped up scooters.

Finally it got close enough to the ferry time that I bimbled down to the port and waited for Liam to arrive, which he duly did and we boarded the ferry and settled in for the journey.; Having only ever crossed the channel on tunnel this was all a bit exciting and I rushed up onto the top deck to see off the coast...

Soon enough we arrived in Calais, off loaded and headed off in darkest France. We'd planned on stopping around the Lille area at a handy hotel, only we managed to drive straight past them all, and mysteriously ended up in Belgium. We made for the nearest Formula 1 since, of course you can check into those all night, can't you? Nope, not in Bloody Belgium you can't. After much kerfuffling around we found a cheap shitty gaff in town that had a room for us and promptly passed out.

A nice receptionist in one of the full hotels had given us a key to their secure garage and we parked up in there. Rather bizarrely the garage was actually a deserted office block and we parked up next to the toilets.