When we went to Rustival back in March, I met a guy called Kam Srih, who runs a club called Nordik Rides, and who invited me to display the car at a meeting at The Great British Car Journey in Ambergate, Derbyshire.
Yesterday was the day, so on Friday after I picked my daughter up from school the two of us loaded the car up, brimmed it with shell V-power at the local station and set off on our road trip at about 4pm.
185 miles and 3hrs 40minutes later we rolled into the car park of the Premier Inn at Ripley, the wheels only having stopped turning to wait at a couple of roundabouts, with the fuel guage still showing well over half a tank.
After eating in the McDonalds next door, back in our room I introduced her to the cult classic film 'Tremors' before turning in for the night.
After our all you can eat breakfast, we popped to the local Sainsburys to get some lunch and then headed to the museum.
On the way an F-plate 240 pulled in front of us up ahead. "I bet thats going there" Emily said, and then - "ooh, can you smell that!" just as I noticed a slight bit of blueish smoke as it pulled away that I commented on - "Well, It could have 300k on it for all we know"
The reality, as it turned out, was that the mileage on that car once it was parked up, was 833,269 miles! I think its allowed to smoke a little bit at that age!
I didn't take that many pictures for some reason, but this was taken by a professional photographer (who has kindly given permission for us to use the 'facebook resolution' photos) as we drove in:
and a video with us arriving on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAdy9V7Y3s
After a good few hours walking around the cars and getting into conversation with some really nice people, including JLiddy of this forum, we went over to the museum itself.
Smaller than the museum at Gaydon, they still had a lot of cars packed in, and a very good interactive audio tour to take you round the display. We only spent about an hour and a quarter in there, I reckon we'd both have been happy to have had at least another hour to look at all the detail.
The other feature of the museum is that you can - for a fee - actually drive some of the cars there. Definitely one to come back to.
When people started to disperse, with a long drive ahead of us we nipped back to the Sainsburys again to get some more drinks and then I bottled it and refilled the tank again with their Super Unleaded in case the guage had got stuck or something. Turns out it hadn't, and on the run up the car had returned 32.2 mpg!
Another 185 miles back with Emily in charge of the playlist, we only hit a little traffic getting back at a sensible time for tea.
The car ran faultlessly (as expected) with only a moments mild panic when an awful noise started coming from (from my useless directional hearing perspective) the fuel pump area. As it turned out what had actually happened was my water bottle that was lying on the handbrake had shifted position and was squeaking against the centre console!
As I said to Emily (stolen from someone else) "Taking a road trip in a modern car is like going to the football and seeing a 0:0 draw. Taking a roadtrip in something 35 years old is like going to the football and getting to see a 5:5 thriller - the end result is the same but at any point you just never know what is going to happen".
Also rolled over to all the 8's, conveniently enough as we passed through the local industrial estate about 5 miles from home so I could pull into a car park to get a picture.
Only another 744,381 to catch up to that 240!