Hi all,

For anyone that is curious, I've started up a new blog for this year's Peking to Paris. This time I am travelling with Hayden Burvill; who is a legit air-cooled Porsche racing engineer. His company, Windrush Evolutions, sells some sweet old-school Porsche performance products. Hayden and I became friends on the 2010 p2p.

I am really looking forward to this year's rally. I have a lot more car to work with. The suspension is stronger. The engine is more powerful. Hopefully the wheel won't fall off this time :)

As before, the Lovely Michelle will be helping me with the posts.

Anyways, follow the fun at p2pcar54.blogspot.com!

She's almost ready

Ladybird has been at Topline for several weeks now. The rebuilt engine has been installed and started. We are anxiously waiting for John to finish up the last details.

Second life in retirement planned

For anyone still following, I've been working on Ladybird again. The rally is long behind us now. After a nice rest, I've dusted off Ladybird and started getting her into shape as a nice street car. A fresh engine is currently being built by John at Topline Parts in Fullerton, CA. The rear suspension has been repaired. The off-road rubber on the ground has been swapped out with nice, comfortable street radials. All of the rally paraphernalia, such as the rally meter, desert air filter, extended range fuel tank, fog lights, and mud flaps have been removed.

In about a month, Michelle and I will have a nice, good-looking convertible suitable for turning heads and drive-in movies.

After braving through Peking to Paris twice, one of the longest and most difficult motor events in the world, she deserves to enjoy a fun, active retirement.

We're famous!

We made the Picture of the Week at PistonHeads!

Which got picked up at TheSamba!

Very cool.

Mongolia Pictures!

These pictures are very special to me. This is the family that entertained us while we were stuck in the desert for 9 hours waiting for a truck.

The kids were an absolute joy. As I said in the post, the girl is very bright (and a stunning beauty)! She picked up on using the camera in the iphone very quickly. The boys were having fun doing some martial arts bit from a movie. Does anyone recognize the moves?

I love the pictures towards the end. The little boy is ridiculously cute. The grandparents have stunning dramatic faces. I'll be looking at these pictures for the rest of my life.

Iran pictures!

Unfortunately, I took very few pictures of the guys in Iran of the car club that helped us out.

That's Saeed in one of his dune buggies at his superkart track. The t-shirt was a gift from Robert and I to the club. In the group picture, Saeed is on the left in blue, Abbas is seated center in horizontal stripes, Mr. Ali is standing in the back, and Mohammad is on the right. And finally, Mr. Ali's 1956 beetle!

These guys really saved our butts. They get my enduring devotion.

Building Ladybird pictures

I've uploaded some pictures of Ladybird at various stages of production. We started in February 2010 and you can see that there wasn't much bolted to the car. It had wheels, doors, and not much else. I would drive down to my dad's on the weekends and bolt on parts that he had gathered during the week. Unfortunately, he also had to work on the car quite a bit because of the time crunch.

The car was mostly ready in time for Robert's first visit in July and the car shipped two weeks later.