2016 was a memorable year for Eva. Having escaped the scrapyard and put back into good condition, we set off for Germany in her to visit my daughter and then go on to a 480 meet which had been advertised on here. It was the 30th anniversary of the 480 introduction, and a German member called Daniel went to an enormous amount of trouble to organise an unforgettable weekend.
For us, the best thing he did was to track down John de Vries who designed our lovely cars and invite him to come along. John speaks good English and brought lots of drawings/cuttings and general information with him, and we had several long chats. Such a nice man ! On arrival on Friday afternoon, Joep and his family rushed over to greet us (we'd met them at a Dutch meet the year before which we'd gone to in Sven) Within minutes, Joep and several others has spotted that Eva's bonnet was not quite lined up perfectly, so up it went and got adjusted along with the pop up covers.
That's Joep far right in the navy t shirt. Eva's 'catalyser' badge was photographed multiple times, the turbos over there don't have them.
On Saturday we did a 'road book', ie driving a predetermined route from crytic clues and spotting things along the way. John had never actually driven a 480, so Daniel had arranged for him to be chauffered by a Dutch member. We stopped off for lunch in a pretty little town and took over the carpark.
sigh - there's always one the wrong way round isn't there Jeff ?
Saturday night was a BBQ round a big campfire with plenty of German beer, and we were all given a Skandix giftpack containing two bottle of lager and two tall lager glasses engraved 'Skandix' There was also an auction of 480 spare parts (Daniel has a business buying, selling, repairing and breaking 480s.)
On Sunday we gathered in the local Lidl carpark for group photos.
Here is John with Eva on the left. As you can see it was a great turnout, more than 40 cars. After the photos we had driving skills competitions. I was blindfolded and had to drive around a course with Al giving me instructions. It's amazing how disorientating it is ! Needless to say I made a complete hash of it, simply through just not believing that Al could possibly be right.....
I did however redeem myself when the blindfold came off and I was told to park as close as I could to a board without hitting it.
Not bad - I got 2nd place.
In Germany, the first group of letters of the registration plate indicate the town, then after is the town badge followed by 1 or 2 letters and 3 numbers which can be bought for 100 euros, anything you want as long as it's not rude and no-one else has it in the same town. So at the meeting were
GT 480, ES 480, TT 480, V 480
then someone in a town abbreviated to ME had ME.MY 480, but best of all was FO.XY 480
Every car that went to the meet came home with a Limburg clock - Daniel had collected 50 clocks, presumably mostly from cars he'd broken, and he had new faces printed. No idea how long it took him to prise 50 clocks apart to change them, but Al fitted Eva's straight away.
We also came home with the news that everyone from the meet was invited to a meeting of the French 480 club in the September, so we went to that as well, but not in Eva so that's another story for another time.