Reilly Traveling Circus

The day wasn’t quite as bad as the title implies but it was pretty bad. We woke up to gray skies, cold temperatures, strong winds and a steady stream of rain. Fortunately, we have figured out how to make our defrosters work and we were able to navigate much better than we were on the way to the ferry in Finland. Turns out that being able to see the street signs helps.

The flip side of the rain is that it created some pretty waterfalls cascading down the rock sides of the roads were traveling. Road quality is great and traffic is minimal. Things went south, so to speak, on the regularities. A couple of navigation errors and some deceptive regularity instructions combined to create our worst performance yet during this rally. Although to be fair, our worst performance day on the Nordic Challenge was better than 98% of our days on Peking to Paris. Only one test, so I managed about 4 minutes of driving time for the day. Given how the day had gone, it was perhaps appropriate that it was on the “Hell Race Track”, reached by the highway to Hell.

The next issue to arise was with the car. As Yogi Berra would say, it was déjà vu all over again. Driving through a tunnel, Jeff noted that the instrument lights weren’t working. Upon investigation in the garage at the end of the day, we found that the running lights and brake lights were not working. Not good. Discouraged, we called it a day and headed to the hotel in Tronheim (the Britannia, quite nice). There was a short reception, a briefing about toll roads in Norway and then a sit down dinner.

Things went better today. Today is the one rest day of the rally. We headed over early to work on the car. It was cold enough that I was wearing my Patagonia jacket. First job was the brake light situation. I was able to disassemble the floor boards, determine that the switch was working but there wasn’t enough travel in the brake pedal to activate the switch. With the mechanic’s help, we adjusted the throw in the pedal and we once again have functioning brake lights. The running light issue turned out to be the same one we had in Copenhagen. Short in the right rear tail light assembly. We fixed that and on the advice of the Tuthill crew, disconnected our license plate illumination lights. Doing all of this managed to run our batteries down and we then made the discovery that the plug in jumper cables supplied with the rewiring were wired backwards. All this by 10 am.

Jeff and I then walked around Trondheim and stocked some items for the last 4 days of the rally: markers for the navigator, microfiber cloths and glass cleaner for windshield and 9V batteries for our intercom. We walked down to the waterfront. Brisk winds and it started to sprinkle. The town is pretty quiet; people may be recovering from Norway’s World Cup win last night. Out for more sightseeing today and then on the road again tomorrow.