JOGLE

OGLE stands for “The John O’Groats to Lands End Charity Road Trip,” but as you can probably imagine, it got a bit tedious having to write, “The John O’Groats to Lands End Charity Road Trip,” even with a strategically designed short cut for the Palm, or copy and paste, or AutoCorrect.

This is the story of JOGLE 2003. Since concluding the trip I’ve amended and updated this page, but you know, the original JOGLE will probably never be topped in the same format.

But before I start, a great many thanks to Andy T, Colin and Karen for some great pictures!

Inception, Concept and Idea

JOGLE’s my fault. I have always wanted to travel the length of the United Kingdom mainland, just because it’s there to be driven. I guess you could blame my wanderlust.

I first thought about taking a konvoy along this route back in September 2002, whilst on holiday in Scotland.

I also wanted to use this as an excuse to raise money for a charity, too!

A Long Meet . . .

Well, you could say that!

We met up on the Thursday at various points, but the convoy got it together at Inverness, and then trekked up the A9 towards John O’Groats.

Now John O’Groats is little more than a hamlet, and an exposed and cold one at that. Still, a nice shower block proved useful in conjunction with reasonably soft ground!

Here’s the shower block, in the background of the Kamp Site (that’s the larger building on the right!).

Once packed up, it was time to enjoy the Scottish Highlands. Ka style!

After pitching Kamp, we spent the night up there, before packing up and getting ready for the first leg to Motherwell.

We took reasonably frequent stops, and during the early part of the adventure, we were still putting our stickers onto the Kas.

A great many thanks to Andy T for his sterling efforts associated with the stickers – without your help Andy, we’d not have those fantastic stickers!

We were very lucky with the weather in Scotland – this shot shows Loch Ness when we stopped for some lunch.

This shot shows Kermit driving along the A82 south of Loch Ness and Loch Lomand, which has to be a most fabulous road.

With excellent visibility, the konvoy must have stood out for miles.

We weren’t the only people enjoying the Highlands! This shot shows Kermit going past a bunch of tourists – note that they all stopped to look at the konvoy rather than the mountains!

After Interford 2003, we all went around Penny’s house for some food – a great many heartfelt thanks to Penny, especially considering the cock up I made of it /blush/.

But special mention must go to the neighbour’s cat trying to hide under Woody’s Ka, Chilli. Penny’s at the time husband chased the cat off with a SuperSoaker! You can just see the kitty-kat in this picture.

Don’t worry, it was chased off before Woody had the opportunity to turn it into kitty litter by driving over it!

These shots show a familiar site – a petrol station! During the trip, we filled Kermit eleven times (including when we left York and when we returned home). Kermit’s fuel consumption was not as good as I had of hoped, but this wasn’t all down to me and Charlie, he had a binding brake.

Although getting lost, or taking “not quite the right road” was all part of the experience, this picture shows us having arrived at the penultimate kampsite, at Weston-super-Mare. You can read more about Kamping here.

This shot illustrates what it’s like to have Trinity bearing down on you!

And this is pretty much the view the driver has through the rear view mirror!

The Other Aspects of JOGLE

The above shots show one of the most important aspects of the JOGLE trip – relaxing and unwinding in the evening! After twelve hours on the road, you’d need to unwind too!

Konvoy – JOGLE Style

One of the most entertaining aspects of the JOGLE Road Trip has to be the way we “looked after our own” when driving in a konvoy. Four stickered-up Kas are quite hard to miss, even for the elderly and infirm, and most people were very nice to us. Occasionally, drivers would intentionally try to disrupt the konvoy by deliberately getting into the middle of us, but we experimented with a few ways of countering this behaviour /cough/.

Almost all HGVs were polite, but a few were dangerous in their sudden and unannounced overtaking manoeuvres, especially on the motorway. It is difficult to miss an overtaking vehicle with its headlights on, and some of the moves made on our vehicles were downright idiotic.

The occasional middle-lane blocker caused us some anxious moments. These people adopt whatever speed they can between 60 and 80, but do not change lanes. So, when one gets behind an overtaking HGV, they’ll tailgate at 60 mph until they’re free to accelerate. When the konvoy of Kas overtakes all three vehicles at 70 mph on the speedo, and then the overtaking HGV pulls in, we do not expect the middle lane hogger to accelerate up to 80 mph or so mid-way during our konvoy overtake, and cause havoc by not considering his or her actions!

We also refined techniques for dealing with aggressive drivers. Some drivers seem to enjoy tailgating a single, lonely Ka on the motorway, especially in restricted-speed road works, and we’ve seen Mercedes-Benz drivers flashing us, then get boxed in by four Kas, and suddenly their demeanour changes and they become quite pleasant!

Not to mention psychotic middle aged female Golf drivers!

Driving in konvoy did illustrate how some people can get very frustrated following vehicles at the speed limit, and the odd driver decides to force his or herself into the stream of traffic, brake hard so as to cause the overtaken cars to also brake, gesticulate wildly, then overtake again. Base specification, and blue, Vauxhall Vectras seemed to be the common culprit for this, as well as silver Astras.

So if you pulled a crazy, daft overtaking manoeuvre on the konvoy, care to email me to justify it?

Chilli in pursuit of Kermit!

This shot shows typifies a lot of the Scottish multi-laners – quiet save for the occasional HGV! We learnt to give them a lot of space!

JOGLE Ka Handling

For the road trip, I had deliberately planned to have two new tyres on the back, and two worn (down to 2½mm) on the front. Ordinarily, I’d consider replacing tyres when down to 2½mm, and also ordinarily I’d have replaced all four at once, however I did have my reasons.

The primary reason was that of trying to help balance Kermit’s handling. We were carrying a lot of extra weight, and almost of it in the rear half of the Ka, which tends to encourage oversteer if you lift off as all of the extra weight carries considerably more inertia. This is far more obvious on a wet roundabout or low speed corner, indeed it’s possible to get the back end to hang out just through careful (if you’re trying) or careless (if you’re not paying attention) steering input. I was trying to set Kermit up so as to discourage the back end sliding - with that much weight onboard, once it starts, it would be difficult to get it to stop!

It worked; in the low speed corners, Kermit understeered under power, but if you backed off, the rear tyres clung on. The only downside of this behaviour became apparent when tackling some of the steep twisty sections in Somerset. Many sections of road involve a reasonably steep gradient, followed by a corner (with a lesser gradient), followed by another steep gradient. When going uphill, it was difficult to keep the speed and power up enough to ease the uphill bits without encountering lots of understeer. Similarly, when going downhill, entering a corner too fast made the front run noticeably wide, and lifting off caused the nose to tuck in but the back didn’t step over.