RogueRunners 22 Day 8 - The Return Journey - or the Sundering Of The Fellowship

Sadness – the last day. Usually the group – or most of it – heads south to a split up point & farewells are bidden, but this time the Zero & the black & yellow Caterham had departed yesterday, the Elises were driving to Hull to break the journey, The MK & the all yellow Caterham were going south on faster roads, leaving only the Stylus & the Avon to wend their way on the pre-defined route.

The Stylus & The Avon left the hotel car park last, but before we’d even got to Haltwhisle’s bypass, we were joined by – the MK & the Caterham coming from the other direction. Oh how we laughed.

The four of us trundled through the Northumbrian countryside for maybe twenty miles before our routes diverged, leaving just two of us to take on the A686 Hartside again – this time without another car in sight on the way up OR down – excellent. The way up & down Tan Hill was similarly unimpeded & we rewarded ourselves with an ice cream at Brough Castle (again - two scoops of fudge). The first fuel stop was in an odd (& expensive) little place, with old British sports cars both for sale & being restored & presumably the proprietor’s small boy getting very enthusiastic about the cars that had appeared.  After that things were less good, with traffic, my throttle jammed open, but righted itself pretty easily, poor road surfaces & some SatNav strangeness that resulted in us getting split up.

I waited for a while, but Linda had gone another way thinking she was now some way behind. In fact it was I who was behind but the jammed open throttle was now a jammed closed throttle so I only had about 10% throttle travel & wasn’t going to be overtaking anything. No matter, we met up again at the next petrol stop, by which time the roads had opened up a bit & my throttle woes had eased, so we had a nice rumble to the garden centre where it all began & indulged in coffee & coffee cake & that was it – officially over.

I knocked off the last 100 miles without incident & the car got tucked up in the garage. The cleaning & fault investigation can wait for tomorrow, but the car has been a little star. Fresh out of re-build it’s covered almost 2,250 miles without complaint – OK there’s the airbox to fix, but it’s a small thing & has caused no secondary damage.

Now that's a car that's been on a ROAD TRIP!