Portugal

Boom! A loud noise of iron and our trailer’s wheel had just overtaken us!

The first attempt to go to Portugal failed just a couple of hours after the departure.
Myself, Brett, Will and Vincent. We took the highway, we crossed the border and while driving through the Spanish Basque Country we suddenly heard a weird noise, the car started to slide and we saw the trailer’s wheel just pass to our side at breakneck speed, bouncing around and disappearing around the next turn!
Vincent managed to stop the van on the side of the road and luckily for us no other vehicles were around and the jet ski on the trailer was safe! We were terribly situated, on a highway, on the emergency line on a huge overpass just after a tight turn and it was raining.

Basically a very dangerous situation!
No panic! Luckily the auto rescue came quite soon and in a couple of hours we managed to load the jet ski on the car trailer and to move away. The rescue team finally found the wheel a few hundreds meters forward and we could recover it as well. That was very lucky cause the wheel could have hit or bumped other vehicles on its way.
It was impossible to fix the wheel that day and because we were pretty close to our houses we decided to postpone the departure until the day after.

Attempt number two.

We fixed the trailer’s wheel and we confidently restarted our trip. A few hours after our departure we realised that something was wrong with the van and we were losing power…
Suddenly the van stopped! Our trip was far from done! We turned into mechanics and we started to manipulate the engine. After a while we were back on the road but way less optimistic…

A few kilometres later there was another weird noise and we saw some smoke coming from the car! We stopped again! It was late and dark, with no chance to return to the road on the same day. Once again we were obliged to call the car rescue and they brought us to a local hotel. The good news was that we were actually in Portugal!

Attempt number three.

At the beginning of the afternoon the van was ready and we hit the road again. Only a few hundred kilometres separated us from our final destination. We were confident and we thought that this was the day when we’d arrive. And so it was! Almost 3 days after our first attempt we finally made it but not without more surprises:

our van in the last hundred kilometres started smoking again and losing power. We did 100 km in 3 hours but we didn’t care; we took a risk pushing the van and that was worth it because we arrived in Peniche and I spent a nice time surfing excellent waves, meeting lot of interesting people and partying hard! Classic!

 

 

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