Saturday 25th August 2007 - Day 1

The Start

07:30 All entrants to this years BritBallRun were asked to meet at the Heritage Motor Centre, Warwickshire. Great line up when we arrived and luckily we pulled up in time to see the RAF boys make a grand entrance! Coloured smoke billowing from the back, very loud patriotic music blasting out of the speakers and one of the guys sat on the back of the lotus waving a large GB flag! What a great start to the weekend!

Navigators had then been asked to head over to the meeting room for Day 1's briefing! Thankfully the organisers were aware of my bad legs and made Andrew do the walk to collect the information for the first day!

Parked up in Wales

Cars were let loose at 1 minute intervals and it wasn't long before we were following the first set of instructions and heading for Checkpoint number 1! From this point on it would be down to the 'skill' of navigation to get us from checkpoint to checkpoint whilst keeping the mileage to a minimum.

From Worcester to Llangurig we opted to get TomTom to take us the shortest route. We also programmed the Navman for this part of the journey but after about half an hour of the male voice on TomTom saying one thing and the female voice on the Navman saying something completely different we decided they were sounding far too like us and we couldn't stand it! TomTom won and we followed him through allsorts of tiny little roads around the back of beyond before hitting checkpoint number 2!

Strange Toilet in Aberaeron!

Over the next 8+ hours we visited Llangurig, Aberaeron, Abergavenny, Hereford and a fair few other places! Having never really been to Wales the scenery really blew us both away and Andrew could be heard more than once saying 'these really are perfect roads for the roadster'! Some of the strange items we had to collect along the way included a leek, a red dragon, a daffodil and a postcard from Aberystwyth! Around 7.30pm we pulled into Solihull which we would call home for the night!

The Jewel of Cardigan Bay

Being cooped up in the car hadn't done my legs much good and when we arrived at the hotel I needed to feel the wind in my hair before dinner so Andrew headed for the bar and I hit the streets of Solihull for a very, very slow hobble and a little fresh air!

Dinner and drinks gave us some time to get to know a few of the other entrants. Sat at our table was half of the blues brothers and the RAF boys, Porky and Algie...what a great laugh! Steak for dinner and a couple of pints (for Andrew) then before we headed to bed I had to endure the moment I had been dreading!

At the navigators meeting in the morning Andrew had been given a sheet with 52 different playing cards printed on it. It was my task to memorise ALL of the cards in the right order for a memory test to take place after dinner! Due to illness and my medication I don't have the greatest memory so had agreed with Andrew that I'd do my best to remember 5! Even he looked shocked when I told him I'd managed to get 14...I can even remember them now...3 of Hearts...2 of Clubs...erm...