After twenty-three gruelling hours in a seriously packed economy class cabin, we arrived in Frankfurt via Abu Dhabi, ready for what we thought was a well earned luxury business class flight to Strasbourg in France.Turns out, our double degree IT guru and fellow motoring journalist Alborz, (who said his friend at flight centre had it sorted), had completely misread the ticket. Bus – actually meant BUS – the road going version. All sorted?
By some stroke of luck though, the bus company had grossly overbooked both Strasbourg bound buses, and Bruno, the guy at the Lufthansa desk, worked some magic and presto, we had a Ford Mondeo TDCi for twenty-four hours, at no cost. Gold, we thought.
Bugatti Veyron 
The diesel powered Mondeo is no slouch, within moments we are sitting on a comfortable 200km/h as we head towards Molsheim, the home of
Bugatti.It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes into the trip and bugger, something felt badly out of whack with the front end. What we found, was a dirty great big hole in the middle of the right front tyre tread, which meant we weren’t going anywhere fast. That is, until we got the spare on and rebooted to that blissful 200km/h.
The look of disappointment on our faces, when we lifted the boot lining and saw that 125-width space saver, said it all. And it was a Sunday!
Bugatti Veyron
Rather than push on at an impossible 80km/h (its downright dangerous on the Autobahns) we stopped in at Hertz in Heidelberg and switched over to a little Peugeot 307 1.6L diesel powered wagon, which believe it or not, was good for a steady 190km/h and that’s hauling the four of us, with a stack of luggage and camera equipment!
Alborz also forgot to download the Euro maps on our Mio Sat Nav and we were damn too tired to figure out the road map. Lots of stops to ask directions in my half decent French (the other’s will surely deny me that credit) eventually paid off.
Bugatti Veyron
Molsheim is not a big place, and when we saw the
Bugattisign inside a high security compound, smiles were a plenty. We were less than twelve hours away from an event, few in the world will ever claim.
