30 October 2001 - Boring straight roads
The day, once again, started in our usual style, arriving at the start line this time with literally seconds to spare! We must be gaining a bit of a reputation already, as we were greeted this morning with a little cheer from some of our fellow competitors! It's nice to know they missed us!

Our first destination for the day was a small town up in the mountains, right in the heart of the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. We can't remember its name to be honest with you, we were far too excited to read the road signs.....

There is only one way to describe the roads we travelled on this morning, bloody fantastic!! Hairpin bends, precarious drops down the side of the cliff, some fantastic views, and very few people coming the other way! Wow! Alex was in the drivers seat for the first stage, and the grin across his face was too wide to fit in a Mini! (we had to open the windows...)

We will be posting some 'in car' video footage on this website when we get back, so you too will be able to experience the joy (or should that be the terror?) of Alex's driving.... We'll send you an email when its on the site.

The mountain driving was taking its toll on the Mini's clutch, so we took it easy for about 10 minutes. Then we thought 'clutches are replaceable' and carried on taking advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity, thats of course until we come back next year!!

The next stage of the day was to take us up to a large dam at the top of the mountains. We're pretty sure its the same dam used at the beginning of a recent James Bond film. It might not be, but it sounds cool, so lets pretend it was. It was a fantastic site seeing all the minis parked along the top of the dam, not something you see every day!

Next we were to take the short but twisty road down to the local school for some lunch. This was a private road, which meant we were guaranteed that there would be no traffic coming the other way.... I think you know what we're saying!!

Dan spent most of lunch on the phone back to his office, some problems back in the UK to sort out apparently. (thanks to rickster and madlemon for the help here, theres a few bottles of wine in the boot for you already!).

More of the same, fantastically twisty, roads kept dan entertained for the journey back to the hotel, only disturbed by the occasional break to let the now floppy clutch pedal recover! A quick visit to the event mechanics round the back of the hotel on our arrival soon sorted out our problems, apparently quite a common one on this leg of our journey. Can't imagine why....!

The day was brought to an end, you guessed it, consuming large amounts of beer and wine! Viva Italia!!

More soon....




Finally, thanks to all the new subscribers to this daily update email, I have no idea where you're all coming from, but glad to have you! As a thankyou, we will be bringing back a case of wine (i'm trying to blagg a free one from one of the event sponsors) which we will send to one lucky 'daily update' subscriber picked at random on our return.

Please keep passing the web site address on, and please let us know if you feel like sponsoring us - it's all for charity you know! Just reply to this email with your generous pledges. Details of the charities benefiting can be found at www.r136xoa.com

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