Unveiling our masterpiece

Today was an exciting day for our Micra, Martha. Not sure we've mentioned that we named her that but that happened quite some time ago. Anyway, after giving the Micra one final lick of paint we were ready to unveil her. We are very pleased with the results:

She now definitely looks the part.

We also spent some time packing the car up. We thought we had lots of room left until we then started jotting a few things down we hadn't yet put in and the list turned out to be quite extensive. We have been extremely busy over the last few days as every time we think we're getting anywhere something else pops up that we've forgotten.

Finally, we drew the raffle tonight - many thanks to all those who bought tickets. Here are the lucky winners:

1. Body shop toiletries - Yellow 411 - Peter Tissington.
2. £10 Meadowhall voucher - Pink 276 - Kasia Taylor.
3. Two Cineworld tickets - Yellow 48 - Katie Bowen.
4. Bottle of sparkling wine - Blue 9 - Hans Hux.
5. Bottle of rum - Yellow 378 - Dimitra.
6. Bottle of vodka - Pink 145 - Sue W.
7. Fishing pole - Pink 182 - Anne M.
8. Box of Roses chocolates - Blue 121 - Bernie Path.
9. Two Sheffield Wednesday tickets - Blue 222 - Tessa Willis.
10. IceSheffield family skating pass - Yellow 121 - Cormac Cahill.
11. VW camper van money box and bag - Pink 13 - Doug Nairn.
12. Laptop stand - Blue 29 - Barry, Ania and Matthew Lee-Potter/Kucewicz.

We will endeavour to get your prizes to you as soon as possible!

That's all for now before the final push to get ready tomorrow.

xx

More impatient painting

This morning we took the car down to our mechanic, Jim, to give it the once over and check out a few niggles we had with it. He returned the car to us this evening after having replaced the radiator, the shaft from the gear box, fixing an oil leak, adjusting the clutch and changing a couple of belts. The car is now as good as new and ready to snail it's way to Mongolia.

We have also invested in some US dollars as apparently that is the currency to have in the Asian part of the world.

So, in the mean time we set out to finish the painting work we finished out yesterday and here are the results:

The wheels came out pretty well though the roof rack still needs some work doing to it as it looks pretty awful.

Upon the return of our trusty steed, confidence in our painting ability inspired us to paint the bumpers. We spent quite some time taping the area around them up with newspaper before applying the primer:

However, we have not acquired any patience since yesterday and after a good 10 minutes wait proceeded to put on the first coats of paint:

We're expecting it to look superb when we finish it off tomorrow. Hopefully we'll have enough paint as we've picked a colour that nowhere seems to have in stock. We've been to every Halfords in Sheffield and further afield to Chesterfield and Rotherham to get our colour of choice.

That's all for today but more to follow upon completion tomorrow.

xx

Stickers, lights and foot pain

Friday was quite an exciting day for our little Micra. She was taken down to The Signshop to be stickered up. Dom had all our art work sorted so we handed it all over to be put on our car. A day later, we returned to find our car looking like this:

Beautiful. We can now drive around Sheffield giving some exposure to all our very kind sponsors who have stickers on our car.

Today we also realised, with only 4 days left till we leave, we actually have quite a lot to do on our extensive list. We started off by collecting our passports from the post office this morning - we now have all our visas except for the Turkmenistan invite. However, nobody yet has a Turkmenistan invite so hopefully The Visa Machine will come through for us and we will get those this week.

We then went off on a little shopping spree, buying a 12v car kettle, a toilet seat, some paint, rally lights, a dashboard anti slip mat and some water purifying tablets.

Upon our return, we set out to do our first bit of unassisted work on the car - fit the rally lights. This started off well as Rich proceeded to run over my foot when putting the car in the garage. What made things worse was that when I shouted out in pain he stopped the car on my foot, proceed to reverse back over it and then change his mind and drive forward over it again. Not ideal.

Nonetheless we spent the following 5 hours fitting our rally lights. We drilled quite a few extra holes in the car:

The finished product gives the car a subtle sporty finish, while still affording it added practicality:

Spurred on by our lighting success, we decided to do a bit of painting. We decided to first test out our artistic skills on less important areas of the car:

Although the spray can said to allow 24 hours to dry; patience is a virtue we do not have so after an hour we applied the first main coat. We await the results tomorrow.

We also bought train tickets home from Heathrow airport in what has been our most effective day of planning yet. Hopefully we'll be doing the same tomorrow so expect an update here.

xx

All things Mongolia

So a bit more time has passed since I updated the blog as I have been very busy with work. However, as my last day is on Thursday I will have a lot more time to focus on keeping everyone up to date with what has been going on from then on. I'm going to have to jog my memory a bit in order to remember everything we've been doing since the last update. So, in no particular order here's a brief summary of all things Mongolia.

One of the biggest milestones in our brief Micra owning history has now come to pass as we have had the little beauty insured. It has been insured for a month starting on the 3rd of July, just in time for us to drive down to Birmingham for Isaac's christening. The car seems to be in good shape with it flying past all sorts of top end cars down the motorway to Birmingham. The only car we struggled to overtake was another Micra. The 1.0 litre engine gives the car some quite awful acceleration though the top speed seems capable enough. It's handling ability matches that of a banana boat with caution needed when going round bends at speed. Chris and Laura informed us that the back seemed comfortable enough, though granted as Chris said he's only going to Birmingham and back in it. Phil jumped in on the way back and things looked a little more cramped.

Over the weekend Rich's Dad made a sump guard for our Micra courtesy of PFC Industries:

We did a bit of work to fit it yesterday:

Our Dad's finished off fitting it today so I will follow up with a picture soon. Rich's Dad also made us a guard for the front radiator grill to stop stones hitting it:

Our car is now essentially bulletproof, capable of facing any terrain no matter how tough.

We now also have three brand new wheels for our Micra. They are going to be used as our spares should anything go wrong. Two of them will be going on the roof and one in the boot. We managed to get hold of three rims from a local scrap yard. Upon arrival we were pointed in the direction of some dead Micra's in what can only be described as a car graveyard. There were a few Micra's and luckily for us there was one that had the 14 inch rims that we needed. We also had a scout around for some caps that we're missing from our engine though these had already been taken. Climbing on to the cars which were stacked on top of each other did not appear to be particularly safe. As I climbed up on to one Micra the car above it swayed dangerously from side to side.

Having got our rims we took them to Attercliffe Tyres Limited who kindly fitted tyres to them for cost price. They also gave us with a puncture repair kit as a first line of defence should one of our tyres blow.

We have also been doing quite a bit of shopping for the rally. We have purchased a new car aerial as ours was non existent - something we didn't spot when purchasing the car. We'll now be able to tune in to see what Central Asia's finest radio shows have to offer. It also means that our itrip actually works without it having to be right next to the radio.

Joasia Staszek has kindly donated the money for us to buy a camping stove and some gas for it. The rest of the gas coming courtesy of Towsure who donated us a cash voucher. Couple this with the pans and cutlery we were donated by Susan from freecycle and we'll now be able to cook all sorts of fine cuisine on our road to Mongolia.

Route planning has also been coming along nicely. We will be setting sail from Dover to Calais on the 7pm ferry on the 23rd of July. We will then need to make swift progress to Germany in order to be there for the German grand prix on the 24th for which we now have tickets. We will then continue on to Prague for the Czech Out party and then Poland for the 26th where we'll be staying with Rich's cousin in Krakow. Beyond this, our plan was to travel on to Kiev to visit Chernobyl. However, we have found out that due to some local government issues at the moment this is not possible for the time being. Maps from the Ukraine onwards have been bought so beyond Krakow we will go wherever the wind takes us.

Finally, Dom kindly sorted out the art work for our car. The boy is a genius with photoshop and made most of our sponsorship logos from scratch.

We're having the car stickered up on Friday so will get pictures up of the finished product then.

Our final preparations are going to kick off next week. Keep checking back as from Thursday onwards we'll keep this blog bang up to date with our latest endeavours.

xx