We are all settled down here in Palma, but getting here was quite the adventure. We had trailer issues, car issues, direction issues all adding up to make what will most likely go down for us as the worst road trip ever.
It all started with a flight from Miami to London, then a bus ride from London to Weymouth. All was just fine with the exception of our oversized bags weighing us down a bit. Once we arrived at the team storage shed our problems began. First off, the car we were taking had a dead battery (we actually expected that much) but we got that started without too much problem. The next morning before leaving, the trailer lighting that was supposed to have been fixed came back from the repair man not fixed. We then threw on our electrician hats and re-wired the trailer lighting in no time. It was very shocking the job did not take longer than it did, because besides learning how to illuminate a light bulb in high school or accidentally completing a circuit through our own bodies, we have no experience with electricity.
"Wait, don't cut the red one!?!?!"
As we pulled around the second traffic circle we heard a pop, and knew that something had gone wrong. We still do not know exactly what happened, but we suspect that we blew the turbo. This limited us to very slow speeds going uphill and if we exceeded too high of an RPM, black smoke pumped out of the exhaust pipe. Our pace was inevitably slowed.
We landed in Calais at 7pm, and made our way though France, Belgium, the Netherlands and finally into Germany. By 5am, we pulled over and rested for a couple hours before waking up in a semi hypothermic state as the outside temperature had dropped to 36°F. The parking area we were in was apparently the coldest place we could have stopped because within 20 minutes, the temperature had already risen into the 50's.
Within two hours we had arrived at our destination in Frankfurt to pick up the boats. As we wandered through foreign streets we got an email telling us that the address given was the wrong one, and the real address was in Hamburg, not Frankfurt. Now, to those who are unfamiliar with Germany's geography this news was the equivalent of driving from Las Vegas to San Diego, only to find out that your boats were actually in San Francisco and the final destination was Puerto Vallarta. What can you do? Well, nothing. So we hopped back into the rig, and pressed on.
Luckily we were able to bribe the shipping yard to leave an employee for an extra half hour so that we could pick up our boats before the weekend, when they were closed. When we got to Hamburg, finding our boats seemed like it was going to be equivalent to a needle in a haystack. With some luck, we found a guy who actually spoke German and some english, and were able to get our phone contact to describe to him, who in turn described to us where we needed to go. Once we unloaded the boats out of the yard, we gave a nice guy who spoke no english a 12-pack (picked it up at a gas station on the way, knowing we were going to need to do some bribing) to help us lift the boats onto the trailer. We had one more stop 45 minutes north at a boat making factory to pick up some more equipment (masts, tools, etc), but were on our way back south just as it started to get dark.
The car really started to act up on the way to Hamburg. Sometimes the hills would be too much for the car to handle, and by the summits we would be slowed to a 30mph crawl. You know its bad when even the sketchiest looking semis are blazing by you. We estimated that we lost approximately one hour for every two that we drove, and at that pace we realized that we were not even going to make our ferry booked 24 hours from then.
We are very lucky that Adam's Aunt and Uncle live in Luxembourg, which was directly on the way down from Hamburg. We pulled up at their house at 5:30am completely exhausted after 68 hours of travel (56 of which was moving). They re-fueled us with food and sleep, and even helped us get the car checked out by a mechanic friend. It is unsure if the car would have made it all the way through to Barcelona without that pit stop. Thank you so much Aunt Ros and Uncle Adam!
The repair job- don't worry, all those clamps did not set us back too much...
After re-charging the batteries, and with a car freshly repaired with clamps and JB Weld we were back on the road heading to Barcelona. Of course, we were still slow (what google maps predicted would take 10 hours, took us 15) but we made the ferry with not much hassle. In the end, our trip began in Miami on Wednesday night, and we arrived in Palma on Monday morning!
Thank you for all your support!