BMW Car Magazine Forum Lake District Winter Challenge - January 2003 Stage 1: Woking to Bedford
If, as many of us often like to pretend, our cars do have human traits, mine was a little shocked on Friday morning. Friday is normally a peaceful day for my car; I take the van to work, and am normally too busy either working or drinking to need it in the evening. So at 9.45am on Friday, when I flung the garage door open and moved the motor round to the front door, it seemed a little peeved, rattling it's vanos unit at me like an angry snake. Then I checked and topped up it's oil and washer fluid, and took the jump leads and tow rope out of the van and put them in the car boot. Once I'd rammed in a rucksack full of clothes, a pair of shoes and a road atlas of Great Britain, the car was well aware that it was in trouble. I'd planned a leisurely journey to Cumbria. Firstly, I was taking my friend Robin from Bedford with me. Robin's a handy person to have on trips like this, possessing a digital camera, lots of tools, and a boundless enthusiasm for cars, especially quick rear wheel drive ones. So step 1 of the journey was to go to Bedford, but first I had to collect my tools from my mother's house, and buy some bus lane; ahem sorry - buy some road tax. Simple? Nope, within the next 40 minutes I'd had to return to my house three times for forgotten items such as keys, tax disc documents and forum member's telephone numbers. This could have got me down, but oh no! I was going to have a good weekend, oh yes I was... I'm not sure of the exact distance but Woking to Bedford is about 50 miles. Over the course of this journey I passed through no less than 5 mobile police speed traps. I think I wasn't speeding through any of them, but I'm sure I'll find out over the next couple of weeks. So, an hour late and mulling over the concept of 3 points I arrived at Bedford.
	As you can see, the car was fairly clean, but not sparkling. At this point perhaps the car realised that I was only going to Robin's for the weekend and so it could relax for a couple of days. Then we put Robin's luggage in the boot.
That's right, there's four cases of tools and two bags of clothes. All present and correct!
And so on to step 2 of the epic journey, off to meet Gromit!