The Beat Goes On

The weary cars and tested travelers arrive in Moscow
by Charlie Leck [18 June 2007]

It was not a handy place to have one's brakes lock up. It took some time to get rolling again.

The old Essex, driven by our son-in-law, Warner Bruntjen and his teammate, Andrew Fulton, has made it to Moscow. It has not been without much travail, including broken shocks, locked-up brakes, and blown cylinders. We’ll have to await the full report upon Warner’s return home, but his blog is giving us some idea of the extraordinary difficulty of this journey.

It sounds as if they have had to keep running on most of the rest days, just to keep up. Fortunately, they’ve found some friendly help along the route and, somehow, they’ve manage to patch together the problems the ailing and aged 1919 car has experienced.

Moscow! That in itself is an achievement. They have covered 5,078 miles from Beiijing, including the tortuous and torturous run across Mongolia.

There is still 2,796 miles yet ahead to reach Paris. The route will take the drivers on to Saint Petersburg and then into Estonia and down through other parts of Russia and the former Soviet Empire. They’ll move into Poland and make a run through Germany.

Paris awaits. We remain hopeful.

Again, for those of you interested, the official web site of the drive is:
http://www.pekingparis.com/index.html

And Warner’s blog site, which will give you more details about the problems they’ve encountered and the solutions they applied, is:
http://www.footstops.com/warnerb/