Author: Jason Perry

We woke up bright and early this morning to meet up with the Paphos classic car club for breakfast. During our meetup, we saw some incredible cars. These included a Cobra, a Dino and a one of a kind experimental 1955 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith. We had a chat with the owner, Peter, and learnt that he rebuilt/refurbished the car himself over 3 and a half years.

The car had been written off in 1956 by a cow!

We shared a wonderful drive out to Aphrodite’s rock with members of the club and some terrific photo ops and film footage, and conversation with Peter about his incredible Silver Wraith, of which more later for U tube.

The classic car club gave us a memorable send off and we saw some incredible cars there too.

We then spent some time at a beach bar near Coral Bay and had some beers and enjoyed some time by the coast.

We returned to the house to have some last-minute work done on the car and to make sure we were ready to leave in just two days.

Our journey started in the early hours of Friday morning with a flight from the Gatwick U.K. to Paphos, Cyprus.

Flight time was around four and a half hours and we landed around 2:00pm local time. Just in time for a late lunch of bread and cheese!

Unpacking and then out for dinner in the town. We caught a glimpse of the Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations outside a nearby church. It involved a LOT of fireworks!

Then off home and to bed, ready for the classic car club breakfast tomorrow.

Whilst I had been taking the camper to Sofia my dad and helpful friends had been ensuring that the MG was ready for the trip.  He had found a number of problems with the electrics, mostly caused by corrosion in the 1960s wiring connections, always a problem on those cars, and wiring that had just not been reconnected during previous works. They topped up the gearbox oil, well down on where it should have been and replaced the back axle oil and changed the engine oil and filter along with adding in an in-line petrol filter in case of mucky fuel along the way.  He also had rebuilt the carburettor float chambers to replace the worn out needle valve that was leaking fuel.

We also decided to rig up dad’s rally Brantz distance and speed instrument as we wanted to ensure that we knew our speed in kilometres and didn’t end up with speeding fines in the north and Turkey.   Just as well we did, as it turned out as the speedometer decided along the journey to progress from highly inaccurate to reading 50mph while stationary.

A lot of work has gone into organising this epic trip—some might say “Adventure.” As always, there are the usual things: passports and tickets, but we found there are many different laws to abide by in different countries.

For example, did you know that in Turkey, you’re not allowed to fly a drone? It is unclear, however, whether it’s permissible to cross the country with a drone, providing it is not used.

As a result, we thought it more prudent for our support crew to meet us with the drone in Bulgaria.

We did some planning for this, so a couple of weeks ago, we took our support vehicle (a VW camper van) to Bulgaria where it’s waiting for us. That was quite a trip in itself!

We struggled a little with the French toll booth tag (“blip and go”)…

@meandmymgc

Life in the fast lane… A small bump in the journey to Bulgaria to drop off this VW camper ready for our roadtrip across Europe in my MGC in under a week. The full video will be available to watch on youtube very soon. Meanwhile you can get updates on our trip via our facebook or instagram: meandmymgc #roadtrip #gonewrong #comedy #classiccar #MGC #driver

♬ original sound – Me and My MGC Roadster

Seeing so much beautiful scenery through eight countries in just two days has given us a real flavour of what we might expect on the longer adventure to come. We’re pretty excited about everything we will experience on our 9-day trip in the MG!

We are now ready to depart; watch this space for the next update.