“Milo, Milo, MILOOOOOO”
Bourne End – Slough – Maidenhead – Bourne End – Loudwater – Beaconsfield – High Wycombe – Bourne End
There was a lot of thumb twiddling in the morning. There’s only so much Internet’ing that one can do when waiting for a car to arrive. We couldn’t really go anywhere as we didn’t have any indication on when Milo [our MGB GT] may turn up. But, at around 1pm, after a yelp from Meg, Milo arrived.
After a few minutes of polite chit chat with the mechanic, where neither of us were paying much attention - we just wanted to see whether the car would run or not (well, I was more envisaging the stickers, and secretly patting myself on the back for how good the white stripes looked on the car). The guys mentioned something about it was coughing and spluttering, and recommended we got someone to give it a bit of a ‘fine tune’ (another mechanics’ slight understatement one thinks). So, we called up a couple of the local MG garages, and thankfully a garage in Slough said they could look at it pretty much straight away.
We thought we’d go for a cruise a little beforehand, to see what Milo was really like. And to be honest, it was rubbish. Coughing and juddering all over the place. I can genuinely say there was no way I was going to drive this thing for the next 4-5 weeks.
On the way to the garage we verbally agreed that if the mechanic said he could do something with it in the next 2 days (it was Monday), then we might consider it, but anything longer than that then we’d ditch it (you can see at this stage we were calling the car ‘It’ rather than Milo), put it back on ebay and go with a hire car (bearing in mind this is a car that has 6 months road tax, 12 months MOT and cool white racing stripes on it. We knew there’d be a sucker out there that would buy it sight unseen much like we had – on paper it seemed a pretty good car?!). But, good old Barrie at Novatech Slough was a bit of a legend. We dropped it off, came back an hour later and not only had he sorted out the ‘timing’ of the engine, but also said the only words we wanted to hear – “it’s not in bad nick. It should be ok”. Anything he said after that was lost in the glorious haze of picturing the drive along the Norwegian coast, windows down, sun shining, shades on, music on the go…
He did recommend getting some spare parts for when Milo did break down in Europe, so we stocked up on what we were hoping are parts we won’t need. Feeling a lot more confident that we could get the Channel Tunnel the next day.
The next few hours were spent ripping out the spare tyre (pfft, who needs a spare tyre) to make more boot space and putting on our [potentially illegal] black & silver number plates, the MG badges for the wheels, and chrome GB letters. There was then a late night trek around South Buckinghamshire to try and find some plastic boxes to store all our stuff. We’d done some back of the fag packet estimate on space, and finally Sainsbury’s Wycombe at 10.30pm came to our rescue. Well, we hope. We were both pretty tired at this stage, so we could have some really ill-fitting boxes in the car come the morning.
Day 1
