Day Four Tuesday Medals, major cities and Ray cooks

Well we leave the lovely Owl hotel today, all the convoy sat down to a meal together last night and a few social drinks (not too many as we are up early as usual). Bob and Steve (Truck Doctor) decided to be adventurous and asked for the local tipple, this was duly delivered to the table and a few hardy souls had a slight sip (Bob only charged a couple or Euros for this honour), the less hardy of us had only to sniff it to decide it wasn’t for us. The unanimous decision was that it tasted of cheese.

We started Tuesday off with three medals being won in quick succession, all in the space of about 15 minutes. Firstly convoy leaders decided to set off with their rear doors open, they said it was to distribute the aid more easily but the rest of convoy was having none of it. Second one went to David (Shinybeast) for being late, this was only realised after the rest of the convoy had set off. Thirdly as we joined the motorway The Simpsons vehicle struggled to pick up speed and warning lights appeared on the dashboard, then the engine stopped, the tried and trusted method of fixing things came over the radios. Turn it off and back on again and lo and behold that solved the problem (the consensus among the other convoy drivers is that Sean selected the wrong gear and stalled the engine).

Todays the day that we have to navigate our way around our first major town, Szeged in Hungary. All the new drivers were warned about the problems that we may face and that the important thing was not to panic and to try and keep eyeball on the vehicle in front at all times. This is the very reason why convoy running order is set up so that there is one experienced vehicle followed by convoy virgins, this minimises the possibility of a convoy virgin getting lost in the towns. One of the other big problems about navigating through the towns is that you have to use what is known as the TIR route which is the route that vehicles our size and over have to use. This often means that you are in a traffic jam with loads of other HGV’s snaking through a maze of industrial estates. We successfully negotiated Szeged, with no problems whatsoever and no one got lost. Let’s hope that all the towns are negotiated as successfully.

We have now crossed the border to Romania and that means the end of the smooth comfortable motorways. It’s all single or occasional dual carriageway roads from now on in. The plus side is that there is definitely a noticeable difference in the roads so far, they are better maintained with less potholes and ruts in them. Hopefully the rest of Romania will be like this. Unfortunately the drivers on these roads still haven’t improved, they drive like suicidal lunatics at times, coming at you from all directions, undertaking, overtaking on blind bends and using the centre of the road as an invisible third lane (and that’s just the HGV’s).

We now hit our next major town on our route, a biggie, Arad in Romania. It looks like I spoke too soon before about all of them being navigated through successfully. We didn’t do too badly though, The Pilgrims and Truck Doctor missed the TIR route and ended up getting stuck in a traffic jam in the town centre of Arad. Not too much of a problem as we all regrouped just outside town and they only ended up about 10 minutes behind (they still got medals for this though)

The winner of the limerick competition was announced and as expected the convoy leaders overruled the Irish lad’s technical complaint and announced that one of the limericks that was disqualified would be the winner. The limerick went something like this

There was a man from Preston called Paul

Whose mistakes were always big but never small?

If he wasn’t snapping your key

He would be flattening your battery (pronounced bateree for rhyming reasons)

And his medals would fill a whole wall

And the writers of this winning limerick surprise surprise was none other than convoy leaders

We get to our hotels at the end of the day and 16 of us end up in one with 4 in one just down the road. Its three to a room tonight so everyone organises who will go in which room, we all just keep getting closer and closer as the convoy continues.

And finally a momentous event occurs today. This occurrence will be of great interest to Liz, the CWU Education Department and the Regional Lifelong Learning Project Workers as well as all of Ray’s friends and colleagues. Today for the first time a very rare occurrence never seen before was captured on camera, as rare as sightings of the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot. Today at around 15:30 local time Ray cooked something, yes that’s true Ray cooked something. Even though he was just reheating and stirring pasta in a large pan, it was agreed that we could classify this as cooking. A truly great day and see the photo’s below for proof.

P.S. I haven't told Ray about this yet, it will be our little secret for now. Suggestive texts and E-mails are allowed though
Until next time see ya later

Paul (one half of the big boppers)