Sunday 9th was the date of our September run. John & Chris Sherburn organized this one for us. They took us along some routes that we hadn’t used in a while. Initially we were out along the Humber/Ouse through Blacktoft, then down towards Doncaster and on into Lincolnshire, to the Trolleybus museum near Belton. We had Richard & Tina Bettison attending their first run out with us on this event. Richard has owned several TRs and is an early member but this is their first social run out with this Group. Thanks to John & Chris for organizing the event.
In September the TRR European meeting was in Northern Germany with a couple of our cars attending (Bells & Myers), but we chose to go a little further. Some of the guys from the Triumph Club de France were organizing a trip to Sicily, which produced 23 cars. We’d been there on our own with the TR in 2014 and decided to go along again, on this extremely well-organized event, to pick up on some of the places that we’d missed the last time. So, 3 weeks of speaking French in Italy. It got to the point where Mary was talking to me in French when we were alone in the car!! This became a tale of 3 ferries. We’d opted to go down through France and Mont Blanc tunnel for Genova and our meeting point at the ferry for Sicily – Sicilia – or Sicile as we now had to call it with the French. Our Zeebrugge ferry was cancelled at shortish notice, but we managed to get away a day early for a more leisurely route to Genova. Having met up with the rest of the TCF group for our, almost 24-hour, ferry to Palermo, it was then late arriving into Genova. So, we were also late into Palermo. After a 50-mile run to our hotel we eventually sat down to a 4-course meal at midnight. Whilst it might seem a long way away, as part of this trip we attended a couscous festival. Here the translator was the daughter of my best-man, whilst her son had been waitering at the festival when on holiday from Uni. Sicily is fascinating and beautiful, with historic connections to Carthage and to the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Normans!!! We had historic ruins, several active volcanoes, including the Aeolian Isles, sunshine and a slant on Italian food & wine. Great weather apart from a minor interruption, fantastic scenery, fantastic company and organisation, but occasional roads with pot-holes big enough to literally swallow a TR. The return motorway route was sunny and warm, a wonderfully scenic route across the Alps, plus, with the continental climate having Autumn arrive earlier, so fantastic colours in the trees across France. Return ferries didn’t seem to be a problem, but well after we’d boarded at Zeebrugge we discovered there was a problem with the stern doors, so we sailed after midnight and got home about 4 hours later than usual.