Recce Trips

Recce Trips are the key of our tours’ success, and so we invest in them lots of time and effort: Documentation work, long stages at the wheel searching for the best roads, meetings with suppliers and visits every day, some scary situations, and a lot of laughter.

This section is reserved to those stories, anecdotes and situations we have lived on our reconnoitre trips.

Snow, lots of snow.

In Classics on the Road we divide each season in two parts. One for designing the tours and doing the recce trips and the other one for the tours with our clients.

Obviously, the recce season is very often when the weather is not the best.

It seems like a normal situation to drive across the Alps in December and finding out the roads are frozen, as it happened during one of the recce trips we did for the Aston Martin Centenary Tour, when we even had to change our rental car for another one with winter tyres and four wheel drive, with which we did 3000 very enjoyable km over snow and ice. But sometimes snow comes in places where we don’t expect it…

It also snows in Sicily

In the Mediterranean island of Sicily, when doing a recce for the Morgan Sports Car Club of Spain, everything went fine until we had to cross the “Portella Femmina Morta” (Dead Woman’s mountain pass), a nearly 5000 feet high pass. All of a sudden it started snowing so hard the whippers couldn’t cope with it, the tarmac disappeared and the snow begun to get worryingly high.

Some locals asked us for help to get their 4×4 out of ditch and they confirmed us we were on the right track and they looked at our Fiat Tipo in a not very reassuring way when we told them we wanted to make it to the top. Only 500 steep mts to the top, so we gained enough speed but the snow started to slow us down, and just when the car was about to stop, we reached the other side, which had been cleared by the snowplough.

Are we still on the road

In January 2017 we went to Greece for the recce of a tour we had scheduled for the spring. A cold snap was hitting hard eastern Europe, and as we arrived to the airport in Athens, we were told we might find “some snow on the roads”.

At the car hire desk, they didn’t seem to know what winter tyres were so, as we had gone through this before we asked for a 4-wheel drive car. All they had was a fairly small Suzuki Vitara with descent control, locking differential and a few other buttons for off road use. We had pressed every button already on the second day, but this didn’t keep us from pushing the car and shovelling snow several times.

Deep into Greece snowploughs are scarce if not inexistant, so every time we had to drive over a mountain pass, we crossed our fingers, knowing nobody would come to our help in a short time basis.

The most difficult moment ended up been also the most fun. It was getting dark and we had a long way to go to our hotel, which was a beautiful mountain hut at the top of Mount Parnassos. The hotel manager, with whom we had a meeting next morning calls Diego and says: “I don’t think you should come tonight. The access is steep and frozen, it’s snowing very hard and several clients have cancelled their stays after trying to arrive”.

It was late, it was dark, we were already behind our schedule because of all the snow we had found on the roads the previous days, so we decided to give it a try.

When we got to the access, it was even steeper than we thought, the road was a solid ice sheet and it was 5 km to the top, here we go.

Juan: “Gas Diego, Gas. Third gear, you are going sideways. Left. Now Right.”

Diego: “I can’t see anything!”

Juan: “Me neither, but hold it straight. My iPhone says we are on the road.”

Diego: “Whew, that was a close call!”

Juan: “Gas Diego. Sh…, We are losing speed.”

Diego: “We might have to walk our way to the hotel with the suitcases.”

Juan: “No way! We would be found frozen tomorrow morning. Left! Left!”

Diego: “O.K, O.K. I’ve got it!”

Juan: “Too fast Diego. Too fast!! Slowdown we are going to get off the road!!”

Diego: “Relax, I have it under control…”

Juan: “My iPhone says we are only 500 mts away”