Day 8 is our first non drive day and boy did I need it. We had a lovely dinner last night with our rally friends and hit the sack at 10.30 with the idea to sleep in. No alarm needed.

7am AB is up! So it was a 30 minute sleep in.

Andrew hops in the car, he had already assessed that the first navigation instruction was wrong, and this was confirmed by the rally organisers who had put out marker arrows to ensure we all got out ok, rather than navigation mistakes right at the start of the day. Another great day ahead of us on the 2024 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge!

Everything can change in a day, your car breaks down, you have a bad navigation error, suddenly you are out of the competition part of the rally. This is one of the reasons we stay away from worrying about the competition aspect and just enjoy each day. Though it is hard not to look at our results at the end of each day.

And then we had a navigation disaster…..

It is the Peking TO Paris motor challenge and this means you need to ensure you have your navigation right. This is Andrew’s job. My job is to ensure I drive us and manage the car in a way that it remains on the road and roadworthy. Andrew has to ensure we follow the route well, and maintain the time checks for the beginning and end of the day, and the various tests along the way.

I’m in the queue waiting to get going sitting behind car 43 but I will be sitting in front of him shortly we all have to go out on a specific time so our rally time start for today is 8.54 the first car is going at 8:30, we are car #24 so that is a good place to start and the rally doesn’t normally start this late. We started at 7:30 yesterday that is a more usual time for us to start especially if we have a long day.

So, the day has finally arrived. May 18, 2024 and the start of the 2024 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge.

We had a great start to the rally. We all have to be at the start line for your allotted time, but there is a fantastic local display of dragon dancers, acrobats and drummers, this starts at 7am. And then the rally starts in earnest 37 days of adventure!

So Thursday things got serious. We were all assigned a group to get our official paperwork, name tags, driver licenses and name tags. We were in red group, which was the second of 5 bus loads, we were pleased to be on an early bus as there is quite a bit to do once you have your car – assuming your car works after all those months on the water and sitting around.

As I have mentioned before, this year the route is almost completely different because we cannot go through Russia, and because of border crossing logistics, we are not even going through Mongolia.

This year we go through China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, San Marino and in to France.