Kroymans Weekend

Wow, it's been a while. Time for a bit of catching up.

The last weekend of August we had quite an adventure. It was PB's work's yearly cabrio weekend. And it's just as cool as it sounds. But this year, it also got steaming hot...

Friday night PB came home with 'his' convertible: a bright blue Alfa Romeo Spider with a 3.2 liter V6 engine. Awesome! So Saturday we decided to take it for a spin. First, we dropped by at Hester's place. She told me she'd never driven a convertable, so we did our good deed for the weekend. ;)
Then we set for Groningen for the yearly gathering of the Le Roy family. I was really looking forward to that, but we first needed to check out the power of the V6 engine... on the German road. We had just crossed the border and hit 200 km/h when I thought 'what's that smell?'. A few seconds later the car - with the roof down of course - filled with smoke! We stopped at a nearby parking lot and saw we had a flat tyre. Luckily nothing really bad happened (thank god for 4WD), I mean we had a flat tyre driving 200 kilometers per hour!



So there we were, on the side of a German highway with a flat tyre. We found out super cool sports cars don't come with spare tyres. Instead we discovered a repair kit, but that did not work. There's not much to repair when your tyre is ripped to shreds.
So the only thing left to do was call the ADAC and wait for them to pick us up. That took about two hours. The ADAC guy told us we probably didn't have enough air pressure on the tyre, and that probably caused it to tear at a high speed. We learned our lesson: regularly check the pressure on your tyres!

He towed us to a closed garage on a deserted industrial area where we did some more waiting. By then we had given up on the idea of making it to the family gathering at all.

After a total of about six hours of waiting from the moment we were stranded by the side of the road, we were picked up again by another ADAC car. The Spider was taken somewhere else to be repaired and we were dropped off at a car rental. By then it was 9 pm and the place was closed so we had to wait another hour for the manager to arrive and give us a car to finally go home. The rental was a Peugeot 207.

What a bummer, and next day was the cabrio tour! Luckily there was a spare convertible we could borrow: a decent, trustworthy Saab 9.3. It was a lovely, sunny day and a beautiful tour. A perfect ending of a far from perfect, but very adventurous weekend.