travel - Trouble free motoring in the badvan
Wookey
BECKA - guessed date as 13/7
The bad van struck again. I negotiated a subsidy from NC Graphics UK Ltd. to carry a Pentium Pro to NC Graphics Deutschland near Munich instead of sending it by courier. NCGD's boss is Dieter Trinkner who was happily painting and decorating the top floor of his parent's-in law's house with his wife ready to move in (NCGD head quarters is in the basement) when team expo arrive with a steaming car, smelling a bit because we've not had a bath in a week in preparation and boot and roof full of shit. You could hear the tone of the neighbourhood drop several octaves. This used to be a nice place with twee little window boxes and BMW's in every driveway, and people who never forgot to pray before their din-dins.
It took them ten hours to get rid of us. First they called the German AA because they thought that Nat. Breakdown was an insurance company willing to pay for any old unauthorised car fettling activity, and we persuaded them to cancel that after a bit of hassle as we went through the regular channels. Nat. Breakdown wanted to know which day and what time our ferry back to England was for some reason. Then they began to make contacts with the local garages and give them the wrong phone number. We were always phoning back and getting told no one could find us. The exact problem with the car was that a hole had been worn into the middle of the radiator. It pissed out steam and water pretty quickly. We kept our hosts entertained for hours by telling them tales of all our other car disaster epics across Europe. And after seventeen million phone calls to various Germans, farmers, grandfather blacksmiths, we gave up and told Nat B. to get us towed out. We still hadn't run out of stories. The entire family waved us off and 4 hours later the pissed off young man who had to tow it up the perch pass in 1st gear got us to an empty campsite.