2008/01/14

2nd day - The longest day

Today’s stage is from Mestre to some French town, 1050 km. With our average 60 km/h speed it will be approx. 18 hours. In case we don’t break down. In one word: we suck. We planned to leave at 6am, and after a minor repair we finally kicked off at 7am. Problems start: According to our mechanics-drivers the engine and the aggregator can’t work at the same time, the chance to blow up is too high. This means that there’s no 220V while on the road. There’s no X-box. No fridge. No microwave. It sucks. We worked out a fitness program on the handle bars, now everyone is hanging from them. By the time we reach Bamako, everyone will have toned muscles.

So far, the highlight of the journey was enivetably the coffee in the Autogrill in the morning. It started raining, and the bus leaks in in many places. Duck tape solves any problem. In the morning we managed to reach a 65 km/h average, but a wrong petrol fill up held us back. We reached the sea, the sun came out. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to stop to eat in Genova, boiled sausage was the menu, cooked on the bus. It was the most painful moment of the journey so far.

Aravind slept almost the whole day through, he starts to recover from his injuries he suffered in the Autorickshaw Challenge.

We drive on the French motorway. Must knows about the French highway: there are many French on it. Everything is in French. The coffee at petrol stations is much worse than in Italy.

We had the first service. Soma and Gyula changed the pressuretube (I assume), and filled up the cooler. It took them approx. 1,5 hours. I got to know that our stage today is 300 km longer than the others’. This means that tomorrow, the distance will be 150 km less, in addition, we’ll have a whole day to rest in Almeira.

We’re speeding in the French night. By 2am we reach our destination, the Formule 1 hotel in Perignon. Everyone is dumb from the constant noise. The smell of the petrol is sometimes unbearable, in the sleeping unit the beer cools down. I was expecting exactly this!

Pictures are coming up soon!

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