The team left the North East just after lunch on the Thursday for the 2 hour drive to Hull to catch the ferry to Zeebrugge.  Once boarded we located our cabin, dumped the bags and headed for the bar. Eight hours later and the whole trip was planned with finesse & flair, with the timing down to the last second……so off to bed full of beer and giggling like a bunch of school kids.  An 0600hrs wake up call over the tannoy brought us back down to earth, after a cooked breakfast it was time to disembark in Zeebrugge.

Our destination for the first day was the Ypres ERC & Historic Rally bit firstly we made for Tyne Cot Cemetery to pay our respects to the fallen soldiers of WWI, a very humbling experience seeing the 12,000 gravestones 80% of which are unknown soldiers and the backdrop of the 35,000 names of soldiers who were never found.

We headed to Ypres centre & collected our media passes then had a wander around the servicing area for the ERC entries in Ypres Market square, a beautiful setting for the cars.

We then travelled to Boezinge for the historics servicing area which was an amazing wander down the main street with fantastic machinery being tinkered with on both sides of the street

So we headed of to stage 1 at Langemark to see the ERC cars and boy were those front runners giving it their all, no holding back on the tarmac roads through the fields of Belgium.

We then headed to Dikebus for the final stage of the evening and were blessed with a beautiful sunset on a warm evening with the raucous sound of rally cars crackling through the twilight.  Results from the event can be found here http://www.ypresrally.com/en

A quick ride to our digs for the night, a few drinks to re-hydrate and off to bed for an early 0700hrs (well for me & Dave) start for the journey down to Spa Francorchamps for the Spa Summer classic