From Siegfried: Today is a big event in the preparation of the Rally. We are going to pick up the Wartburg from Bad Liebenstein near Eisenach, the city of the former Wartburg factories. It is a four hours drive from my hometown Steinfurt to Bad Liebenstein, and we (my daughter Anneli and I) start in the early afternoon to finally get the vehicle for our long trip! We arrived around six and the car looked just great: a few dents and a little rust, but aside of this very solid and plain!

 

So this is the car which will bring us from London to Ulan Bator! Of course, the trip back home should serve as the ultimate test drive! Will it survive?

The pre-owner of the car told us that we should get fuel right away, since the fuel tank was almost empty. I missed the first two stations since I was trying to get used to the new driving experience (which turned out to be more difficult than expected). So just after 3 km I ran out of gas. So we had to use the other car to drive to the next station to buy a canister with gas to get started again. Having done this, the car started quite well, but it worked just horrible! The 15 km drive from Bad Liebenstein to Eisenach is on a small road with many bends and  hills, and I had to go full throttle in second gear to climb the smallest ascents! When entering Eisenach, I was leading a convoy of about fifty cars which followed huge smoke clouds which escaped my exhaust pipe.

 

Nevertheless, we still planned to take the car home and fix later whatever problems there are. But for this we first had to stop at a gas station to get the fuel tank filled up completely for the long trip. We did so in Eisenach, but when the tank was filled, the car didn't say a word anymore. It just refused to start. So I had to call the Yellow Angels from the German automobile club to get us started again. Just 80 min after my emergency call they found us and it turned out, that the fuel pump of the engine is broken. No way to get such parts on Friday night! So we had to leave the car in a garage in Eisenach, and just had to go home without it! But we will pick it up very soon after it got fixed in the garage!

 

Isn't that a great start of our tour! We are now absolutely certain that the fuel pump will not break on the trip---which, as people in Eisenach confirmed, is the only part in the car which can possibly break!  So it should now be very easy to do the