Thursday 19 June 2014

Aaron's Day Out

Yesterday I decided to take a day out to just enjoy myself and forget about the stressful situation surrounding me in London.  So after dropping Beany at school and Micky at the child minder I drove out to the military training site known as the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.  It's a fair drive, but I had all day and what a nice summer's day it was.

Remember if you click a photo you can see them all bigger like a photo album, though you won't see the commentary that appears on this page, so perhaps read this page then click on a photo to view them bigger.


Military vehicles were practicing along this part of my route but I knew not to take a photo, as I've been chased down for that once before and made to delete the photos.


I had to divert my intended route here because red flags were flying where I had planned to go, which means they're firing live shells and if you proceed past the flags a mortar could land on your car!  Actually there was a serious incident recently where the army fired a live mortar and it flew well out of the red zone, over two villages before blowing up in a farmers field.


This place that looks like a village isn't quite what it seems.  It's in the middle of the Salisbury Plain, miles from anywhere and is known as the German Village.  The army uses it for test combat training and you can't go in there.






The next photo shows the German Village in the distance.





In winter this whole place is much more of a mud bog and more care is needed to make sure you don't end up getting stuck.  But in summer it is much drier and not challenging for the Mitsubishi, which would probably have coped just fine even had I left it in 2wd mode.  That said the wheel ruts are deep in places and occasionally I hear my bash plates scrape the ground.  I have nearly 300mm ground clearance under my bash plates, so despite the lack of mud a car still couldn't come out here even in summer conditions.  Even the Santa Fe would be at risk of getting bellied on the tracks with deep ruts.


Still some water around.




The photo below shows the new roof rack and bag I have replaced my roof box with.  It's working out very well. I stopped here briefly to make lunch, but I didn't have time to stop add long as I would have liked as it was already time to head back to London to pick up the kids.





All in all an excellent day and I successfully, though briefly, managed to forget about difficulties in London.

Morocco: Western Sahara: Tan Tan - Alsa

Our next route was taking us from Tan Tan (the end of first route) across the Western Sahara to a town called Alsa which Chris Scotts whose...