Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;

whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses* - then, I account it high time to get myself on an under-prepared, reckless road trip to foreign climes. Only this time, I did see fit to incorporate a journey to the world's most infamous race track in a 14-year old Saab with 200,000 miles on the clock, an incorrigible boy racer in a money-pit Fiat Coupé Turbo and a girlfriend with both acute motion sickness and a healthy aversion to interminable petrolhead banter. Europe ho!

We started off in a fairly inauspicious way by failing to find lodgings in Oxford, getting lost on its satanic ring road (Jackie Stewart may have called the Nürburgring the "Green Hell", but frankly the A40 fit that particular bill to a tee) and finally driving to Aylesbury, 30 miles away, to wolf down a pizza and collapse into bed. Next day we caught up with Jez at Dover and settled in for the ferry journey. I'd downloaded a 30-page, corner-by-corner guide to the track, and made a half-hearted effort to absorb some of it, but after five pages and 20 corners, all labelled "Dangerous!" or "Can be fatal in the wet!", I gave up. "We'll just use it as pace notes once we're on the track," I told Jez.

The first 'real' journey from Calais to Ghent in Belgium, was prototypical of just about each subsequent day - we'd spend ages bumbling around the suburbs in city A, cane to city B with alacrity and again spend ages bumbling around the next set of 'burbs until we settled on a hotel. A pleasant surprise, and again a typical one, was the willingness to help of the locals. A plaster-dusted joiner and his mulleted partner pointed out the route to our hostel without us even having to ask, and I couldn't help but think a standard Brit in that situation would have regarded us with contemptuous eyes and a muttered comment about bloody foreigners.

(As a brief aside: why are the British so insular? Why is it so completely beyond us to have compulsory language teaching (for the sake of argument, let's pick French because Calais is even closer to Dover than Edinburgh is to Glasgow) to a reasonable conversational standard? Although we trotted out our pidgin French and German whenever we could, and I think had the gratitude of some of the people we met for doing so, we'd have been sunk without their ability and readiness to use English.)

Ghent had the aspect of a well-kempt, genteel Amsterdam and our brief stay there was excellent. The town centre fed and watered us brilliantly, if failing somewhat to set the party world alight, and we headed off towards Germany about 10 am.

The drive took us along the autobahn in alternating dreary and bright weather, with intermittent downpours keeping the road wet. Ash and I took the lead in the Saab, Jez still lacking a navigator, and we spent most of the journey at around 140kph, not quite sure if the road was entirely free of speed limits. I'd expected to see legions of expensive motors flash past us, but only a white Porsche 968 wandered by at a mostly unremarkable pace.

Nearer Adenau we moved onto a single carriageway with the weather settling into a monochrome Scottish greyness. The traffic in the other direction was increasingly composed of serious and ludicrous metal - sober 911s and stickered GTIs purred and blatted past, and I wondered why so many were heading the wrong way. We parked, found a reasonable hotel (short arms, long pockets moment - asking if we could skip the €16 breakfast got us a disbelieving stare), unloaded the cars and set off for the track.

More tomorrow!

* With apologies to Moby Dick.