Start of the Navigational Rally

After we spent the breakfast time grinning like Cheshire cats and showing everyone and his dog pictures of our new grandchild, Josh, we got ready for the off. Today was the first day of the Navigational Rally where we have to use our Road Books to navigate from A – B via a prescribed route and the cars leave at precisely 30 second intervals. We are team number 21, but we are actually 10th in the running order of departures due to various reasons, so our departure time was 09.04.30, the first one having left at exactly 0900hrs. We are not allowed to use SatNavs!! The Road Book provided contains a number of boxes which represent land marks and signs along the way and give directions. In theory they are easy to follow!!! Today’s was only a short 7 mile route and was not timed, so allegedly an easy one to break us in gently, but we managed to take a wrong turn within the first ½ mile and ended up the wrong way along the one-way system! Oops! Nevertheless, we managed to regain the correct route and after that we got the hang of it and it was relatively plain sailing. We all arrived at our destination rendezvous point in the centre of Turin and we were then split into three teams to do a treasure hunt on foot around the city of Turin! This lasted for about 2 ½ hours and was quite interesting in parts, although rather rushed and hassled trying to find all of the correct clues and keep around 30 people in the same team together! We eventually made it to the end of the treasure hunt where we were given some lunch in a café in one of the Piazzas of Turin. The most fun part of the day was to follow where we all congregated back at the cars parked on the side of the river Po, and waited for the Police escort motorbikes to arrive. They turned up, there was about 6 or 8 of them, in their bright orange coats, and we then had an hours police escorted tour around Turin with all the Minis decked out with flags and banners and generally making lots of noise with all manner of horns and sirens, and causing general chaos, including going through several red lights whilst the police escorts held the traffic up for us – how cool is that! A convoy bumper-to-bumper of highly decorated and very noisy Minis being generally rather silly certainly caused some interest and raised quite a few smiles and waves from the crowds of on-lookers!
The police escort finished back at our hotel, the famous Lingotto ex-Fiat Factory, where the escort continued up the winding car ramps to the roof-top test track. First off there was the first of the special stages, which was a precisely-timed to 1/100th of a second, course where the Minis had to negotiate a number of cones, and cross three different lines at precisely 10 second intervals, making the whole test 30 seconds long. Everyone having completed that, we were all then allowed two laps of part of the roof-top test track which banks to seriously scary degrees at the bend at the end, but was less scary in reality than the anticipation!
We’re now back in the hotel phoning home to see how Baby Joshua and Mum is doing. Josh is apparently a bit anaemic so is having a blood transfusion, but the doctor has assured Chris it is nothing to be alarmed about and he should be absolutely fine. Our daughter-in-law, Ewelina, is unable to see Josh tonight as she is confined to bed, having had a c-section birth, but he’s in good hands and will be back with Mum tomorrow. We’re just getting ready for this evening’s meal which is at a restaurant on the roof-top right by the test track, so must dash and get ready, tomorrow is a long day off to Monza to the racetrack (approx 100 mile journey to there), and then after lunch continuing to Florence, a further 200 miles, so tomorrow will be a long and tiring day, and all of that route is on road-books only – we could end up anywhere as I tend to spend most of long journeys asleep!!! See you soon, maybe …………???!!