The Latest News

• January 7th, 2007
We've now made it as far as Tarifa in the bottom of Spain. As posting to this website has proved to be quite difficult, please visit our blogs instead to find out about our latest misadventures.
Trygve's blog is at: absolutletrygve.blogspot.com
Jon's is at: fetch-a-phrase.blogspot.com

• January 3rd, 2007
Tomorrow the journey begins in earnest, assuming we can indeed get our hands on the ignoble Volvo.
Our directions to the freight yard, where the car is being housed overnight, are disconcertingly vague. I called our agent, Alan, to see if he could fill in any missing office or building numbers. The best he was able to offer was to tell our cab driver to take us to the "old dock" not the "historic" one. Then in a voice tinged with the tone of an inside joke, he suggested that the operations at the freight yard were not, perhaps, the most modern. I now have visions of showing up to a grimy, Dickensian landscape filled with hulks of decrepit warehouses. A hulking stevedore with a murderous cargo hook in his paw suspiciously directs us to a musty, yellowed office. where we find a balding Bob Crachet of a man scratching away with at his ledger with a quill. Accompanied by a thick, cockney accent, he looks up our particulars then directs a gang of ragged, sunken faced children to roll the car out for us. Offering profuse thanks and scattering a fistful of coppers to the children, we step into the car and drive out of the yard back into the 21st century.

• December 29th, 2006
Our big departure day has been postponed. The ship carrying our Volvo to England is late and won't be arriving until the 30th. The New Year's festivities will then intervene making it highly unlikely we'll be able to get our hands on the car until either the 4th or 5th of January, by our agent's estimate. But all is not lost; the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge is not a race and there will be other stragglers. One fellow apparently had his car engine blow up the first time he drove the vehicle on a test run.
On the bright side, and after a struggle that began to feel like hopping up a mountain backwards, I managed to get insurance for the car. I was beginning to think that it was impossible and that we'd have to bullshit our way across Europe by pretending that my AAA policy covered us. Then Geico very kindly made an exception for us. I feel like I can see the view from the top of the mountain now.

• December 17th, 2006
The Volvo should be most of the way to England by now; though I feel like I ought to look at a weather report to find out if storms may be hindering its progress. We managed to leave everything until the last moment and, as a result, have very little margin for error. We're hoping we'll be able to pick the car in a port near London on the 28th then set out with everyone else on the 29th. Everything depends on the kindness of the Atlantic and nothing being closed for the holidays. All we can do is wait and see. It turns out to be quite a challenge trying to put together a trip like this one with both participants in our team living on opposite sides of one continent and the rally itself taking place in two others.
I'll be heading off to England on the 23rd and Trygve will arrive in London four days later.
For those of you who are intent upon following our misadventures - we'll be posting on both the blogs and this news page until we finally get the best system worked out. Even then the correspondence may be spotty as internet connections are few and far between in the Sahara.

• November 26th, 2006
Tomorrow the car goes down to Long Beach to start its journey across the Atlantic. I'd hoped to do a lot more to it, such as putting on a bash plate and covering it with stencilled art. Unfortunately illness got in the way and I was forced to give up on all those plans. At the beginning of November I went to Cambodia for a wedding (you can see the pictures here) and came back with a parasite that gave me such a fever I ended up being confined to bed for a week. So much for the well laid plans of mice and men!
Today I put up a Donations page. It's going to cost a lot to get the Volvo to the Gambia. If you'd like to help us out please visit it and make a donation.

• October 23rd, 2006
According to the Californian Department of Motor Vehicles I need to have the Volvo pass the stringent smog emissions test before the coveted pink slip can pass hands and the car become our. Normally it's the responsibility of the original owner to pass this test but, because it is a donated car, I said I'd do it. It's only fair. I tried to find a place that would do the test as a donation but couldn't find one. As I am going to Cambodia on Sunday for a couple of weeks and need to ship the car by mid-November at the latest I decided to face the odium of circumventing the rules for the Challenge I took the car in today for the test. It failed. Now I have to pay $75 just to have the mechanic look at it to find out what's wrong and god know how much more to fix it. All of it just to be able to get the pink slip.

• Oct 17th, 2006
We finally have our car. It's a baby blue 1983 Volvo station wagon. My friends, Ralph and Marcy Luikart, were going to donate it to the Salvation Army but, upon hearing of our plans, decided to give it to us instead. After all the months of thinking and planning for the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge, it is a strangely exhilarating experience to go around the back of the house to see the tangible reality of the vehicle and then imagine it making a slow blue streak across the Sahara.

Now it needs to be fitted out for the adventure. We need to create a bash plate to protect the underside and fix the leaking radiator somehow. Some artist friends have even suggested giving it a special paint job. Whatever happens it must be ready for the middle of November when it will be driven down to Long Beach and shipped off to England

• October 5th, 2006
Our biggest stumbling block remains not having a vehicle. We ended up putting a posting up on Craigslist.com and within two hours got two replies. One was an old Ford mini-van that required an excess of work, the second was an antique Volvo station-wagon, that looked beautiful on the outside but not quite so hot on the inside. Like the Ford, it was an automatic which presents problems as it's highly unlikely an African bush mechanic has ever seen or heard of such a system. Alas, someone had already put a deposit on the car before we got the chance to look at it. Now another Volvo station-wagon has come into the offing. This time it's a stick-shift. Within the next few days we'll find out whether we can get it or not.

• September 22nd, 2006
Initially we thought we'd try to find a car in Europe but as neither of us live there, nor know how the bureaucracy works, we deemed it better to look for one here in America. Even though the transport fee across the Atlantic amounts to $1500, we think it would actually work out cheaper and be less time consuming in the long run.

We have submitted proposals to NPR and Cartalk in the hope of getting a donated car. We are hoping to do a tit-for-tat arrangement; in return for the car we'd conduct interviews of the participants, make recordings of the sounds encountered en route to Banjul then send an edited MP3 version to NPR or Cartalk to do what with as they wish. So far they haven't replied.

If all else fails we'll try Craig's list to see if we can get a donated vehicle from another source.