As the Italian job is all about raising money for children's charities and getting sponsorship for the run, Cybil had been provided free of charge by a local garage when Cuan had been looking for sponsors.  Apparently he had thought he was getting a new V reg car (1999/2000) so Cybil had at 22 years young come as a bit of a shock to them.  They had been told she had only done 13,000 miles since new, so she was about to have the journey of her life - and ours!

Cybil soon started to misbehave, stopping on the hard shoulder somewhere between Calais and Reims with no power.  On investigation the electrics under the bonnet seemed sound, so the battery was checked.  There was a strange smell of rotten eggs in the car, and on opening the boot we found steam pouring out of the battery which had run dry.  Bottles of mineral water came to the rescue to refill it, so after a brief encounter with the motorway police where we thought we'd all get locked up, we continued, only to stop again a short distance down the road.  We found that she was losing power when her lights or indicators were used, so planned the convoy in such a way as we could cover her without lights for a while until we got a replacement battery.  Luckily it was still fairly light at that time. There were a few more stops before we managed to find a garage with batteries, with Cybil's battery being recharged from Ben and Mark's car.  Eventually we bought her a new battery and all seemed well ... for a while.

The guys had intended to aim for Basle that night, but all the stops had set us back somewhat.  We stopped for food just before Nancy at around 10.00 p.m. and decided to find a hotel in town.  Easier said than done - there was some sort of convention on and we couldn't find any rooms free - although eventually we found one three bedded room and were considering how we could all squeeze into it.  It was an interesting prospect for Karen and I, the thought of sleeping with six men who we'd only just met, although we felt we'd known them for ages by this time.   The guys could easily have dumped us at that time, and we suggested that we leave them to find something else, but they wouldn't let us.  We found another room in a different hotel, so were contemplating splitting between the two, but then decided we'd try to make for Epinal and found a brochure with some Formula 1 hotels listed.  They had an automatic booking system where you could phone and book two rooms at a time using a credit card and the phone buttons, luckily Ben spoke really good French and phoned twice and was able to book four rooms, although it seemed to take ages.