I said I would post some more pics of the journey back from England with the FC a couple of weeks ago and so, here goes.
We arrived in sunny London, England (that's a joke!) and we got collected and bought back to the workshop. This guy is a Toyota 4x4 specialist and the first order of business was coffee. Then we went out and got the FC on the hoist for me to have look see and make sure everything was OK before I handed over the cash.
First some pics of the side and front:
Then a few of the underneath - when I say pristine and no rust you can sort of see why:
We then got underway and headed for the ferry. The original plan was to take our time and that gave us 24 hours to get to the ferry port. After only about 30 mins on the road we decided we would take the earlier ferry and so we had less than 12 hours to get there. Considering it was about 300 miles or so to the ferry, we didn't want to drive more than about an hour or so at a stretch so we didn't overdo things. We didn't have much time to hang around, so after about an hour we stopped at our first pub in Buckingham for a nice counter lunch.
We kept on driving cross country and kept off the motorways as long as we could. Hit the motorway just near the Severn Bridge where you cross over from England to Wales.
A pic of the crossing of the Severn:
Eventually, we got to Pembroke where we had to get the ferry. We stopped at pub #5 and for the first time, we relaxed and had a couple of beers. We had to drive 500m down the street to catch the ferry.
Coincidently, the pub was called "The Bush Tavern", pretty apt I thought:
Then on down to the ferry port and queue up to baord the ferry:
And another one after we were loaded and ready to sail:
Its only about 4 hours on the ferry to Ireland, and given that we boarded at 0230 in the morning, we had a kip and caught up on some winks - well about 20 of them anyway. Bought some brekky and headed on the home stretch. Got to Waterford City and got stuck in a traffic jam, so I went for a walk and took a couple of pics while we sat there:
One of my favourite pics of the trip was as we hit the roundabout, the FC just looks cool leading the traffic:
We finally got home and the first thing to do was, to coin a phrase, to do the old "out with the old and in with the new" so out went this old 56 model:
And in went the newer, younger 58 model:
I hope you managed to get through all of this and enjoyed the tale. We certainly had a great time and enjoyed the trip immensely. There are a few small things I would like to do like badges and chrome trim and stuff, but overall the FC will be taken out at least once a week for a drive and off to the odd show. It turns heads when I drive anywhere but that doesn't bother me in the least - I really get a kick out of it.
Cheers, Paul.
