London to Brighton Land Rover Run 03/10/04
I got up bright and early Sunday morning (about 4 am) I just woke up that early for some reason and decided it was not worth trying to get back to sleep again for another hour. I did a bit of email etc. before making a cup of tea to get Marie up with. We actually got on the road by about 6.15.
I decided to take it nice and easy all the way to save on the fuel so I rarely went above 70. It is about a 200 mile round trip from Southampton to Crystal Palace to Brighton back to Southampton. We had a good run all the way up to London as there was next to nothing on the roads, but we got a little lost from the A3 to Crystal Palace. The notes from Auto-route didn't seem to match the roads. I ended up going by sense of direction alone and we ended up getting there probably as quickly as if we had managed to go by the actual directions. It was strange but we did not see a single Land Rover all the way there, with the exception of a Lightweight that was heading in the opposite direction.
When we pulled into the Park at Crystal Palace we immediately saw a large number of Landy's already there. We drove around the park and joined the back of the long procession. After parking up, it was a matter of queuing up to register and pay. I was pleasantly surprised at the time this took, it was about 10 minutes at the most and they seemed to be pretty well organised.
There was a short driver briefing at about 8.30 and then we all set off in a very controlled manner at 9.
The journey started with a quick stop a a petrol station to fill up as we were running low on petrol, that's one of the problems with having such a small petrol tank and such a large engine. We pulled back out onto the route in the middle of a group of about 6 Landy's so decided to play follow the leader....First Mistake.
We ended up taking a left at a roundabout that we should have taken a right at and of course everyone else followed. We then ended up going round in circles for a while before getting back on track. The conversation got a little heated in the motor after I asked the Navigator what the directions said and was told well I don't know. It turned out that as soon as we saw another Land Rover in front the directions ended up on the floor. Hence we never knew we were going in the wrong direction.
Anyway we finally managed to get on the A23 and then it was plain sailing. We thought it was a bit strange that they had put London to Brighton Run signs up all the way down the A23 but not before then. Then we realised there was also a Road race happening at the same time.
It was raining quite heavily by the time we reached Brighton and after a rather embarrassing chat with the man with the Microphone on the way in who described the lightweight as Futuristic??? Not really sure why. We parked up and decided to get some lunch. The rain did not stop for the entire time we were there, we hung around until about 2.30 but then decided to head back home before the weather got too bad.
All in all it was a good day with one exception...the weather. It would have been an excellent day if the sun had been out. I am looking forward to going again next year.
Thanks To Keef and John for providing some of the photos.