I have been trialling on and off for about fifteen years mostly in class one cars with differing levels of success and many trips home via Britannia Rescue ! My dear wife also loves the trialling experience, so what do you do when children come onto the scene? Trialling and young children don’t really go together do they? …. or do they??
We do love the Lands End Trial, it has to be my favourite, probably because I was brought up on going up to Blue Hills every Easter to see my Uncle try to scratch his way up the gradient in his Mini! Anyway my wife and I agreed that we would take our two boys, Bradley 4, Jacob 2 and Morvah the dog to Cornwall to see my family the hard way!
I asked my wife Candece to pack a small bag of clothes for us all, and when she had I checked it and halved the amount again to keep weight to a minimum, even the child seat was the lightest we could find. The dog had to use her ballast behind the rear seats and the potty doubled as her drinking bowl.
So on the Friday afternoon we set out to Popham, one small bag of clothes, 4 nappies, one dog, two children, one wife and myself. The run to Popham was lovely in the warm sunshine we almost needed air conditioning. After signing on and trying to help Stewart Ikin with his electrical problem we set out again for North Petherton, a nice steady run across the beautiful scenery of Salisbury Plain, somewhere along the route the boys fell asleep, we checked in at North Petherton and had the car checked with the boys still asleep in the back.
As we set off for the trial proper Candece and I wondered how the boys would cope with the rough hills. We went up through Fellons Oak without any problems, boys still asleep, and we tackled the rough Stoney Street (that really felt rough !) but it didn’t wake the boys they actually woke in the rest control before we went up to Beggars, good I thought, we need all the bouncing we can get from the re-start, I put the Skoda low in the re-start box which was a mistake, but we did manage to get away and out of those deep pits. The boys must have been so tired from their bouncing that they went back to sleep and totally missed the hairpins of Riverton, again with the dry conditions it was tempting not to go too fast.
On to Sutcombe to see the first signs of daybreak, so I threw a boneo into the back for the dog and could hear that she was enjoying that as we bounced our way over the sea of rocks from the re-start. The clutch was starting to feel a little on the hard side after that and I knew that we had the Daracott re-start to come. We stopped in the box on the re-start, the flag went down and so did our hopes of climbing any more sections in the driest Lands End for a long time. We managed to make it out of the section but the burnt out clutch finally gave way on the main road so after discussing the possibilities of changing it in the layby (yes it did cross my mind) we telephoned Britannia Rescue who took us the rest of the way to St.Ives.
So would we take the boys again? Well until they become a real weight liability yes, and they loved it. It wasn’t the easiest way to travel to visit my family but it has to be the most enjoyable way to visit Cornwall. I have to say thanks to Colin Perryman for the advice on the clutch and bell housing, I now have a Sachs clutch and a vented bell housing for the Exeter.
Patrick Osborne and Family
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