Nine countries done... three left and nine hours to go. Will I make it?
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The continuing adventures of a mad marathon motorist. TheTravelEditor.com's Simon Heptinstall attempts to drive to 12 countries in 24 hours...
It has gone midnight and time for a can of Swiss K-fee Turbo cold coffee and a progress check. We have clocked up nine countries and 650 miles. Only three to go, but at least as many miles, on lesser roads and with increasingly tired drivers. It is going to be close.
After the church towers and castle ramparts of Feldkirch, Austria turns into another motorway marathon. In the drizzle it seems go forever. I sleep in the passenger seat while Adrian drives but I wake at midnight in the Arlberg tunnel that runs for miles under the Alps. After another stroboscopic drive under the lights of the Brenner tunnel, we emerge into Italy in a blizzard and swap seats.
At a lonely motorway toll booth in the Dolomites I pull up quickly to find a man and woman cashier squeezed into the same booth. She looks flustered while he quickly struggles back to his own booth with a big smile. Adrian wakes up: ‘This must be Italy,’ he mutters and goes back to sleep.
We pass the 1,000 mile mark at 3.35am. Carriageways are already filling with lorries slowing our progress. Time is racing by faster than the flat Venezia countryside and for the first time I think we might miss our 24-hour deadline. We are simply running out of time. At a service station before Trieste a five-language sign in the car park warns: "Attention! Distrust abusive retailers of various articles.’ By now Adrian and I are too exhausted to laugh.
We make endless circuits of Trieste, hopelessly lost. The sat-nav DVD doesn’t go this far east and our previously fool-proof dashboard map and arrow now show us positioned in the Adriatic Sea a few miles offshore.
It is almost five in the morning when we reach the Slovenian border. Perhaps it was the way we mumbled or the sight of two weary travellers driving a vehicle normally reserved for the pampered few, but the border guard, who looks like Dennis Hopper, singles us out for special attention.
‘You haven’t got the special permit for photographic equipment,’ he says, with a theatrical frown. We park and wait until he swaggers over and wastes more time pouting and saying: ‘This is a major problem. What are we going to do?’ Was he waiting for a bribe? Time was ticking away. Was the marathon going to end here, on a scruffy tarmac patch round the back of a lonely customs hut in the Balkans. I have to do something. I take a deep breath and march up to the puffed up guard who is trying to avoid eye contact. ‘We’re working for The Times of London,’ I blurt out, which, in truth, we both sometimes do. ‘Have you heard of it?’ I smile.
It does the trick. He looks back to the shed where his boss is presumably lurking. He's thinking: 'This could mean big trouble for me.' We are suddenly waved through into Slovenia.
Thankfully, the distance to the Croatian border is short. I just have time to note that in Slovenia the ‘Watch out for children’ sign has a girl with sweet carefully drawn pigtails before we reach the next, last border. And so, just after 5.30am, a young Croatian border guard reaches for our passports and, like Colonel Pye almost 20 hours earlier, asks his routine question: ‘Where have you come from today, Sir?’ I had the greatest pleasure telling him… but I don’t think he believed me.
More from thetraveleditor.com
Read how Simon Heptinstall tried to be the first foreigner to drive right across Rome in the middle of the rush hour.
What happened when Simon Heptinstall took a drive through the woods in Finland, in the dark, in the deep snow, with a rally star....at 100mph.
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