Day 5

Once again grabbing only a few hours sleep after checking out the local fine drinking establishments of Ljubljana, we arose with mixed feelings – sadness that this was to be our last day on the rally but elation that there was a full buffet breakfast waiting for us in the hotel breakfast room!

After breakfast, and with a skip in our beat, we once again set off to locate the morning checkpoint – funnily enough, we were late after getting lost in peak-hour Ljubljana traffic. But who wouldn’t get lost with instructions of “head north blah blah blah”. They lost us when they expected us to know which direction was north!

Finally arriving at checkpoint, we had our first challenge of the day. We felt we weren’t being challenged enough with this rally so we made up a new one – to swap our team outfits with the 3 well-built Wanstead rugby lads for the day. You can see from the photos who drew the short straw on this challenge! However, we fear we might have damaged the rugby lads’ chances of fathering kids in the future with those now non-blooming bloomers!

For some unknown reason, we managed to be at the front of the convoy heading out that morning – which lasted 2 minutes when we took a wrong turn at the lights and ended up heading back towards Italy. Needless to say, the convoy didn’t follow and headed south towards the correct country Croatia. Where’s the faith?

Managing to find the accelerator (something that we had yet to experiment with, hence the reason we had gained the nickname “Slow Knickers”), we somehow managed to catch-up with the convoy at a petrol station on the Croatia border. Perfect timing to see the rugby lads strutting their bloomer bods in front of 100+ army men who didn’t really see the humour.

By now we were convoying with 10+ rally cars (well we lost a few from time to time!) on route to our final destination Split. We were buzzing. We had driven over 3,000kms in a car that we had bought for £0.43 (and don’t forget the case of beer!) and us 3 girls had somewhat conquered it. Sure we played the damsel-in-distress sometimes and got lost more times than we could count, but we had made it from our homes in London to Split in Croatia. And arriving into Split, we found our Racy Knickers Groupies – consisting of Ma & Pa Taylor, Sam (Caz’s boyfriend) and Trent (mutual friend) – waiting for us with a bottle of champas to pop over our car Lulu.

The Racy Knickers had made it (surprise!) – and in 2nd place overall (biggest surprise!) due to the points that we had accumulated on our challenges!

Life really is full of surprises……!

**NEWSFLASH**

We’ve made it (surprised?).  But even bigger surprise, we came 2nd place out of 65 cars!!!

Brain is currently pickled so we will get back to you with updates of Day 5 and the winnings once we have had copious amounts of coffee, fried foods and rehydrated our minds, bodies and souls……

Day 4

 

With wine on our minds and wanting to dance out the DVT in our veins (I think sloths do more exercise by day than us!), we decided that tonight was the night to show our true colours to fellow rally go’ers and go out for the first time without our bloomers or wigs. Error.   You know you’re having a bad hair day when someone says that they prefer the pink wigs. 

Tequila may make you happy on the night but sure doesn’t have the same effect the next morning.  After lots of joking threats from the rugby boys about our car not going to be where we left it the night before, Sare woke us up at 4.30 in the morning convinced that the car was being disassembled outside the front door. Funnily enough it wasn’t, as Caz found when she investigated in her pjs.  We were one windscreen wiper down the next day though and had no air in our tyres… Luckily for us the eyelash batting (ok, perhaps a bribe in the form of bottle tops for our rally challenge) did the trick.

And then we were off – day 4 was underway. Some of the rally teams decided to tackle the stelvio pass – just to see it in the daylight. We on the other hand decided not to go for that option, otherwise we would have been one team mate short, and opted for the easier route to Ljubjlana. Not more than 45 minutes later did we come upon the prettiest little town that we thought we had to see (ok so we saw a gelati shop) – it’s never too early for ice cream we thought.

Our route for the day took us past both Verona and Venice – we could easily stop off at both we thought – have a nice spot of lunch in Verona and then take a gondola ride around Venice and arrive at a nice decent time in Ljubjlana. These hopes were dashed after the Flinstones raced past us after leaving two hours later in the morning than us. Our Lulu just can’t keep up with the big boys.

As Verona flashed by… and then Venice we thought we had to give Sare one last treat in Italy and stopped at a nice highway side cafe where we had a tasty two day old sandwich to the sound of traffic flying by. That was her first trip to Italy… hopefully she’ll go back – with such wonderful culinary delights on offer why wouldn’t she?

Our next aim was to arrive in Ljubjlana before 10pm – a hard feat for us but to our surprise it worked and we landed in town at 7. Having checked in, the concierge asked Caz for the keys to park our car which was out the front next to the bmw’s, porsche’s and merc’s. She went to point out which one was ours (yes we were dressed in our full bloomer outfit) but he said that wasn’t necessary funnily enough. 

We slowly wandered down to the check in point and everyone was quite surprised to see us (even though those who had done the same route got there 3 hours earlier that day). It seems that after all our challenges that we are up there in the points tally – for all you fellow australians out there as kath and kim would say ‘we aren’t a pretty face’ (for all our english readers that’s just us changing around the words to ‘we’re just not a pretty face’ to make it funny – we are really pretty faces of course).  One of Nic and Caz’s highlights on this trip has been that everyone thinks Sare is Australian – think 4 days non stop in the car with two Australians does that to you. She is stoked about that as you can imagine – wish she would stop saying Crikey though.

Anyway, so that brings us into Day 5 – read all about that one tomorrow

Signing off
The racy knickers xx

Day 3

 

So we didn’t know if we would be writing this after Caz’s premonition that Sarah would drive us off a cliff…fortunately we managed to make it to top of Stelvio Pass after a few ‘test runs’ ie we got lost.

Going back to last night when we finally made it to our check point – a whole 35 minutes before our midnight cut-off. After feeling quite confident having an hour left after arriving in Bern – we thought it might be nice to go on a little stroll to get there (see our tracker map to how we got on with that).

Out of the 65 cars that registered, 50 actually started and 40 made it to the first check point last night. We were only 1 of 3 teams to get the bonus points – apparently french policemen are usually not receptive to posing for photographs and getting livestock in your car is proving more difficult.. That said we did get a goat in our car today – not really out of choice – and now there’s a struggle to get dibs on the front seat.

We think a team name change might be in order as we have been nicknamed “Stinky Knickers” by fellow rally go’ers….is it really that unreasonable to wear the same pants for five days that we are on the rally??

With 200 extra bonus points up for grabs by conquering the Stelvio Pass, we set about this challenge like women possessed.  Granted we have an automatic car and had to manoeuvre around 235 hairpin bends with an overheating £0.43 car, but the way we see it is that its going to save on gym memberships for the next few months and Caz thankfully is not a prophetic dreamteller! 

Now touched base in Bormio and there is a bottle of vino (or five!) with our name on it.  Be in touch tomorrow with a bloody big hangover!!!

Ciao!

Day 2

 

Before a 600 mile drive the next day it’s always best to replenish your fluids – which is exactly what we did at the pub last night! Nic being dobbed in as starting driver held back on three wines leaving the floor open to Sarah and Caz to do the racy knickers proud. It could have been the wine but all of a sudden we started seeing cars that looked like bees and spaceships…after that it was all a bit blurry.

We weren’t racing for the first shower this morning, after a rude awakening at 6.30am (that’s french time as well remember) but three coffees later the Racy Knickers were ready to go…or were we? Perhaps knowing where the starting point was would have been a great help – we thought there was no way we could lose sight of the mothership… but obviously there was. After dialing every mobile number we had collated we arrived just before the checkered flag was waved.

On passing go we picked up our challenges for the day which were:
a) photo with a policeman next to our cars doing the bunny ears – check – luckily as soon as Caz took the reigns we were quickly pulled over by the local constabulary. Luckily he didn’t pick up on her prior driving discretions and was more than happy to pose in front of Lulu with us.
b) livestock in car with all passengers – check – with the help of our new rally friends (they even know how to change a tyre formula 1 style), we managed to acquire a live chicken from a random french farmer after first being refused the lend of a sheep (thank goodness for that). Think Nic is feeling a bit bad about her chicken sandwich today but not bad enough not to order it for dinner tonight.

Mind you, we also managed to fit in a trip to the champagne region – we are girls with priorities…

We forget sometimes that we are all doing this in a crazy get up – our hands are sore from waving like the queen and are heads are hot from our pink wigs but its well worth it.

While writing this, we have circled the A35 a number of times so if anyone knows how to get to Bern where there is a beer waiting for us please let us know… We’re thirsty…

Lulu and the Racy Knickers xx
3 september 21.00

Day 1

We started the day with one team member down, Nic taken sick with the 24 hour bug or was it pre race nerves? But she made a racy (ha ha) recovery when she found out that Ma Kinloch was serving up a hearty breakfast!

Friends and family were there to wave us off and say their final goodbyes (is this something that we should be worried about). As we drove off all we could hear was the little boy next door saying ‘she sure looks good but she doesn’t sound too good’. Is this a sign of things to come?

After setting off, we immediately fell out with Karen (our sat nav) by doing it our way which she hasn’t quite recovered from yet. We then visited every services on the way to Dover for caz to ‘stock up on car snacks’ and encountered a few of our own kind… An army tank, fire engine, the top gun gang and the whole of noah’s arc – yet funnily enough we are yet to spot anyone of the female variety. We are sure those bloomers will cause a bit of a stir at the registration tonight…

While other bangers decided to head straight to Calais (our starting point) we took Lulu for a bit of a history lesson to the beaches to Dunkirk – just because we weren’t covering enough kms already! Lulu has been getting a lot of attention with lots of honks from fellow drivers – not quite sure though if it’s because of our driving – this wrong side of the road business is hard to remember.

So we are now on our way to our registration point – a nice traditional french place called The Australian Bar and Grill – lucky for our aussie stickers and signs – we’ll fit right – in maybe even get a free Fosters.

Team Lulu signing off on Day 1.

xx

So we are off…..

And thanks to the kind folks at the Inkerman Group we are being tracked…. (check out our tracking page) and you’ll be able to see where we have got too, if we have gone off track say via Borneo, or if we have accidently broken down in the French wine region….

And I feel safe knowing that The Inkerman Group knows where we are at all times as they are a leading international business risk and intelligence company, working throughout the world to identify and deal with the risks, threats and vulnerabilities facing private individuals and businesses today. And lets face it, three girls with no idea about cars…we are a high risk really. To see what other good work they do, besides tracking us that is, check out their website here http://www.inkerman.com/.

Anyway, it’s time to get ready for our first big day in the car – to Calais it is…. that’s if we make it out of the driveway.

Good luck Lulu xx