Triumph!

The second day of the Club Triumph Historic Countries Run (HCR) - see day 1 here.

At 1:30 am, we had rested, done our second half of planning at the Corley Services on the M6, had toilet breaks and drunk some coffee - time to head off on our second loop! We had no idea how we'd scored for the first half relative to everyone else, but we were pretty sure we'd done reasonably solidly.

Our route for the second half looked a bit like this:

- Start at the Corley Services on the M6, and head south to Watford Gap Services - +1 point for county Northamptonshire;
- Drive to Dreams Bedstore in Luton - +1 point for county Bedfordshire, plus 1 point for bonus challenge "A shop selling mattresses in Bedfordshire";
- Drive to near Lister Hospital, Stevenage - +1 point for county Hertfordshire, plus 1 point for bonus challenge "A hospital in Hertfordshire"; 
- Drive to Stansted Airport - +1 point for county Essex, plus 2 points for bonus challenge "An airport / aerodrome in Essex";
- Drive to Mildenhall - + 1 point each for counties Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, plus a cheeky bonus point for the sheer audacity of pushing the definition of "lighthouse" in the bonus challenge "A lighthouse in Suffolk", by using the Lighthouse faith centre in Mildenhall;
- Drive up towards Downham Market to skim a slice of Norfolk - +1 point for county Norfolk;
- Drive through Stamford to get an even smaller slice of Lincolnshire - +1 point for county Lincolnshire;
- A fly by collection of Rutland as a county - + 1 point for county Rutland;
- Drive to near Melton Mobray - +1 for Leicestershire, plus 1 bonus point for challenge "A pie producer in Leicestershire";
- Drive to the Nottingham Raceway - +1 point for a small slice of Nottinghamshire;
- Finally, drive to the Holiday Inn in Leicester for the finish point and points scoring at around 7:45am.

A total of 22 counties set foot in since 6pm last night - and over 500 miles covered in a 41 year old car. A lot of fun had.

After breakfast the scores were announced, and the blip shows the winning team receiving their winners' cup. Well, it's three quarters of the winning team, because it's missing me - say hi to Martin, Reg and Jason (left to right), my three team mates in car 15. We won by 2.5 points - which is VERY respectable! We were all very, very happy.

Thanks so much to the organisers for a great challenge - it was a ridiculous night, but really good fun. How did we end up driving the 43 minute, 38 mile drive from Stourbridge to Leicester via both Wales and Norfolk?