Fri, 21 October 2016
Mrs. Toad and I, as you possibly know, went on something of an epic road trip at the end of July this year. We took the ferry to Amsterdam and drove up through Germany to Denmark, through Sweden via the Volvo Museum, and into Norway, where we went all the way up the West Coast via the Trollstigen in the South, up through Molde, Kristiansund, Trondheim, Mo I Rana, through the Lofoten Islands to Tromsø. After a couple of days there we went East and South through Finland, took the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, then drove through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into Russia where we spent our 10th wedding anniversary in Kaliningrad, on board a decommissioned oceanographic research vessel. From there it was Poland and the Czech Republic to Vienna, where Mrs. Toad flew home and I carried on to even sillier adventures. But that is the subject for another podcast. For now, here are a bunch of songs from our Norway trip. Because these were all on mixtapes to play in the car whilst driving it's all actually surprisingly upbeat too. Not your usual miserable shite. 01. The Get Me Downs - Sexsie Volvo (00.13) |
Tue, 11 October 2016
Firstly, NO I shall not be launching into a long-winded plea for acceptance over how long it has been since the last podcast. Other shit distracted me, as is always the case when someone doesn't do something. A lot of other shit, in this case. I don't know if any of you remember this, but in April me and my most singularly epic Volvo Bette (pronounced 'Betty' because she's a stubborn and moody old bitch and therefore named after Bette Davis) went on the Rust2Sahara trip with the Rust2Rome Pioneers group. It was, as I am sure you can imagine, a pretty fucking epic experience. After a couple of surprise detours, via Belfast for example, and the Pendine Sands in Wales, and some straight ahead burns down the motorways of Spain, we crossed into Morocco and there the really amazing stuff really began. We dodged camels, lost track of where the road was entirely, jumped sand dunes, clambered over the top of the Atlas mountains on a tiny goat track, visited a Bond villain lair in an extinct volcano, lost suspension, oil filters and exhausts and suffered punctures. We had to ask random mechanics at the side of the road to help us out, welding bits of the cars back together with fags in their mouths and no more than a pair of sunglasses to shield their eyes. We ran out of petrol so badly we ended up having to siphon between cars to get to the next town, and over the CBs we planned and executed a pit stop to swap a battery from one car to another, jump start them and resume our 100mph dash to Tangiers port that an F1 team would have been proud of. In short, it was absolutely fucking amazing. 01. Dionne Warwick - Do You Know the Way to San José? (00.23) |
