With only a few weeks to go until the start of our Great Adventure, we decided it was time to prepare our fleet of fiestas. Christopher and Dan were otherwise engaged and so Rik, Bruce and I made our way to the Battcave. On arriving Danielle (Dan's girlfriend and member of support crew) and I downed a few large mugs of tea while Bruce and Rik disappeared outside.
When I joined them a few minutes later, I thought I had walked onto the set for Billy Joel's Uptown Girl video or a photoshoot for a dodgy mechanics' calendar. Both wore overalls which coordinated beautifully with the colour of the Battlestars - Bruce in blue and Rik in red. I was even more impressed by the attention to detail that Rik had paid to his range of accessories when he produced a very large red shiny toolbox.
In a small Buckinghamshire village one of our top paparazzi journalists that usually divides their time equally between, routing through Madonna’s rubbish bins and planting hidden camera’s in the changing rooms of top London Gymnasiums to catch the most recent wags in compromising positions to add to the stars’ nipple count, has seen them together…
This weekend, in a location that we are under a strict gag order not to allow the secret testing ground venue out, Mr N Barsteward (Nosy to his friends, yeah right he has friends) papped the 2nd & 3rd Battle Stars seen here together for the first time…
People, people, people… The road was long, rough, covered in water and fraught with danger, but we have made it…
By that introduction, it may sound like you’ve read these in the wrong order and actually this may be the last blog entry for me but in fact this is my first (slacker or concerned about my dyslexia, you decide) ever blog for anything…
You probably can't tell from the photo but that's not a 205 I'm driving. It is in fact a Ford Fiesta. A Mk III, 3 door Fiesta with around 61K on the clock to be precise. Sound familiar? That's why I'm smiling. I'll rewind quickly to how this came to pass.
We've now been scouring autotrader/gumtree/205 owner's clubs for a couple of weeks looking for a half-way acceptable Pug without an ounce success. It seems all the decent examples go before the print has dried on the page (or the html has parsed through the browser (depending on how much of a loser you are)) and what we have been able to visit have all been wheezing geriatric heaps.
After some debate, we decided our Plan A would be to go for a couple of Peugeot 205s. The reasons are simply these:
Damn cool car
French, loads in Africa, should be able to get spares if needed
Very light
All surviving examples likely to be suitably crap
Our search did not start well. Last Saturday had been set aside as car buying day but the only decent looking 205 around was up in that well know London borough of Sudbury. Not a huge problem unless your only form of transport is a motorbike, you're going to be doing the journey two-up, it's pissing with rain and you only have one pair of waterproofs. I have titled last weekend, 'the weekend I spent traipsing around in wet jeans'. Eventually the three of us (Chris, Bruce and I) made it up to Sudbury (not doing some sort of circus pyramid, Christopher has his own bike with no back seat and his own waterproofs - smug git). I could not have looked any more like I'd had an accident in my trousers, unless I actually had, which I did consider. Which I suppose would make it a deliberate. Anyway -
The Car
With only a few weeks to go until the start of our Great Adventure, we decided it was time to prepare our fleet of fiestas. Christopher and Dan were otherwise engaged and so Rik, Bruce and I made our way to the Battcave. On arriving Danielle (Dan's girlfriend and member of support crew) and I downed a few large mugs of tea while Bruce and Rik disappeared outside. 
In a small Buckinghamshire village one of our top paparazzi journalists that usually divides their time equally between, routing through Madonna’s rubbish bins and planting hidden camera’s in the changing rooms of top London Gymnasiums to catch the most recent wags in compromising positions to add to the stars’ nipple count, has seen them together…
You probably can't tell from the photo but that's not a 205 I'm driving. It is in fact a Ford Fiesta. A Mk III, 3 door Fiesta with around 61K on the clock to be precise. Sound familiar? That's why I'm smiling. I'll rewind quickly to how this came to pass.
