12 February 2015 Owen looks different

Today was an odd day, the competitors were doing a big loop today and returning to the same hotel in Kanchanaburi visiting a nature reserve up in the hills where apparently elephants roam but sadly we didn't see any, I wasn't with Owen today as we had decided that Owen was staying at the hotel with skippy and fixing a couple of broken cars in the car park and Tony and I were out fixing broken cars at the road side, we started the day at Hellfire pass, the notorious cutting for the Siam Burmese railway where thousands of POWs died in WW2 along with workers from Thailand as depicted in Bridge on the river Kwai starring Alec Guiness, we visited the museum before heading off on our duties, we came across a beetle that had run out of fuel being towed to the petrol station, we got it off the tow rope and started pushing toward the fuel pump, clearly the driver thought this task was beneath him and didn't help, thinking it was more important to fiddle with his telephone and then roll up his tow rope, I think we made it clear that his behaviour wasn't acceptable and thought his navigator seemed embarrassed.

Once the beetle was running we buggered off up the road, concrete turned to gravel and her came the first regularity section of the day, tony had never navigated on one of these events (and he's done loads) so jumped at the chance of doing the regularity and was pretty damn good with only a 2 second difference which is a damn sight better than nearly all the competitors!  We nearly didn't do very well as  just prior to the finish control there was a Bentley moving out of the way for a porsche that had got it all wrong, another Bentley was trying to back up out if the commotion but selected first instead of reverse and nearly went in to the Bentley in front, luckily they didn't touch but was great to watch!

We carried on up the road and came across the jaguar SS with ignition issues, a quick check over found the points were duff so changed them and left, next up was one of the datsuns who's rear hub assembly/shock mount had sheared, we lashed it together to drive it to a welding shop in the village where work started on it immediately, within fifteen minutes we were back in the road closely following the 240Z to make sure all was well, it was.

Now with this fixed we were a long way down the road from the hotel and the chance to see the bridge has now disappeared along with a mercedes that seems to have got lost and has broken down somewhere off route, we have been in contact with the crew and they are en route to the hotel, I hope they make it in enough time for us to look at it before bedtime!

Haven't seen the docs today so can't have a Buckley bogus fact, haven't seen Alice's auntie either so have nothing to report, an early start tomorrow means an early night to bed, so ciao.

Here's a rather camp photo of Buckley, he'll enjoy reading this blog when he gets home, "hello sailor"

Here's some random snaps of the last few days