The first proper frost of the year it must be the London to Brighton Veteran Car run. The others had a 05:00 start but Helen and I left the house to join them at Purley at the Starbucks or Crawley, depending on their progress. We have Rory a call about 20 minutes out but got no answer, we did get hold of Lizzie who was herding children as she left the house.
We took a chance and went to the Starbucks, and spotted Kevin and only had to wait about 5 minutes for the Humbrette to turn up, perfect timing.t he radiator that Rob had fixed the day before seemed to hold out with any a small drip, which compared to pre-repair was a good job. The others did a passenger swap while we let Rory warm up with a hot chocolate and toasted cheese sandwich.
We followed the route until Horley then we peeled off and sped down to the centre of Crawley, where we parked up and headed straight for the White Hart for a traditional drink. Lizzie had made it to Crawley too, so the whole crew were together.
We caught up with the Humbrette and overtook it then got behind again several times due to traffic and various stops. We stopped at the pylons and did a final swap of passengers. We headed directly to the Premier inn where I left Helen then Rory, Norman and IP walked down to the front. Security was quite tight but I managed to jump over the barriers while a security guard a few yards away has turned his back, apparently he saw me but did nothing.
Loading the car was a pain as Kevin had had to park a long way off. We came up with a plan where Kevin wax driven in the Humbrette then drive back towards us, and we met halfway. I was the only one trusted to strap the car on the trailer, si had to go along. They got 6 people into Kevin’s Volvo for the journey back.
We met up at 19:00 then found a Turkish and Persian restaurant and had an average meal. We stopped for a pint at the Cricketer’s on the way back and had a very pleasant pint of Lazy Lizard which is brewed in a garage somewhere in Brighton. We had a good nights sleep and met up in reception at 09:00 and headed to Bill’s for breakfast, then did the tradition shopping.
Journety back was not too busy and we stopped at M’s for some lunch.