Reilly Traveling Circus

A lot has happened since the last post. We continue to be able to run every day and Paris is getting closer. We are in a lake town in Hungary tonight, heading to Salzburg tomorrow. We’ve completed 33 days out of 37 and we’re beginning to think that we’ll make it to Paris.

Since the last post, we’ve had a few adventures. We missed a turn going into Istanbul and Google maps led us up a small street that was blocked by a crane, then rerouted us to a steep narrow road in a not so great part of town that turned out to be one way going the other way. We were within 50 feet of getting back on course but had to pull to the side to let traffic down the hill. A car going by misjudged the angle and creased his door on our back bumper. Meanwhile, the traffic police arrived. The held up traffic so I could go up and turn right. And then promptly disappeared. Jeff haggled with the driver of the creased door over the cost of repairs. After circling the same neighborhood 3 times, we finally made it to the hotel. That was incident #2 for the Porsche, the first being rear ended in traffic several days earlier. Fortunately, no damage from that one.

They say bad things come in threes and we are an example. As we were completing the stage leading to Sofia, we had a second regularity. We had just finished it and were heading down the road into a left hand corner. The road was quite narrow and we were unpleasantly startled to see one of our fellow competitors in a large Toyota Land Cruiser barreling straight towards us. I veered off the road into the weeds but he made contact with the driver’s door and rear quarter panel. He was driving the Land Cruiser because his original car died and was unrepairable. He flew home to England, got this car and drove back to the rally. Our car is still drivable but it hurts every time I see the driver’s side of the car. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

On a positive note, we’ve had 9 days of good driving. We are improving in the regularities and yesterday had our first perfect score in one. The scenery is quite nice; we drove up along the Danube yesterday and it was striking. The days have been long but we’ve had good weather, mostly good roads and continue to enjoy interacting with the other competitors. We had a rest day in Sofia two days ago and got to see the old city there, as well as repairing the brake lights on our car. All in all, we are in a much better place than we were in Kazakhstan.

On a less positive note, the struggles of the Celica continue. Recurrent issues with the front suspension and steering set up have required extensive attention every day, a full day in the shop in Sofia and cropped up again on the road today. Keith and Harry have been very resilient but it must be frustrating to be battling these issues every day. The silver lining is that they have gotten to know some of the rally mechanics, who are very skilled and also very nice, quite well.