Dear Beast Crew

The Beasts have hit the road, we are ready to start our stroll around the world.

Tuesday, 26 October 2004
Leeds to Hamburg
We left old Blighty on the eve of 26th October 2004 after chugging across the M62 to the port at Hull, reversing onto the ferry and being squidged in between 2 very large lorries on the freight deck!

After a slightly inebriated and depressing evening of saying fond farewells to family and friends we left British phone reception and drifted off into the North Sea. After a stiff english breakfast and 3 hours sleep (Tom snores!!) we headed up through the Netherlands upto Hengelo where one of Tom's friends, Mareike, very kindly put us up for the evening.

We then set off up to Hamburg on what should have been a fairly innocous route and uneventful day... but we are in the Beast, who likes to play clever tricks with us to brighten our day! We ran out of petrol on the A30 road to Hamburg with Adrian at the helm. After waiting a few minutes at the side of the motorway, panicking we luckily managed to stagger into a parking spot where we pestered several truck drivers, who were smuggling smashed up cars into Russia and the eastern block, for petrol but they informed us there was a petrol station 10km away.... would we make it? We thought it would be better to chug at least half way there and walk, so we set out at 2 mph along the busy German highway and just managed to splutter into the petrol station!

Next stop we noticed that we had a punctured tyre...

So tyre changed, here we are in Hamburg in a red Beast in the middle of the city parked up in a mobile home park. A visit to the red light district last night found us in a gay bar singing Karaoke!