We all knew when we decided to take on this challenge of doing a tour of Europe with three thirty odd year old vauxhall Astras, that things could possibly go wrong…..Well it started almost straight away when i noticed that Alex’s car had a bit of a noise coming from the front wheel area..a bearing to be precise.
We persevered with it, hoping it might go away but no, it got gradually worse to the extent we couldn’t hear ourselves or more importantly, any music…!..
I was worried, and realised it needed fixing. We got to Croatia and asked the nice people at the digs if they knew of a garage that could help us out, bearing in mind it was about 8.30 in the evening….yes of course, a garage up the road was still open…off we went, got the car up on the lift and sure enough, one badly worn bearing, bad enough for him to recommend we didn’t drive it anywhere…! The parts were ordered next day and fitted the following day, giving us a day to kill in the local area where we went to a couple of local attractions which we wouldn’t have done otherwise..

Job done…and off we went being able to hear ourselves think..!
Obviously this was a major hassle and we were lucky to get it fixed in such an efficient manner.

The heat has been affecting the cars also, with it being unusually hot, and we are having to monitor the engine temperatures constantly, with Simon wiring his fan to run on a manual switch, Nick removing his front grille, and us all having to run with the heaters on to dissipate heat..!

Alex car then lost all its power steering fluid, not a major problem until you want to parallel park somewhere…! ….soon followed by Simons power steering pump rattling itself to pieces..

Nick suffered a flat tyre after hitting a severe pothole, also causing concern of suspension damage but seems not too bad.

So, so far so reasonably good, as i write this, we’re heading for the Pyrenees tomorrow and we’ll see what awaits us, at least it might be cooler…!