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http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... I am absolutely spitting right now. I just wrote for the last hour and half to try and update the last week, writing pages and pages, and the computer froze right before I finished it. I don't really have the time anymore to fully update it, but I will give a brief description i suppose. This is not a rally for only guys, but there are maybe 15 women compared to hundreds of men. Next, we have not been able to upload pictures on any computers that we've been able to find. We've mostly been camping in small eastern european towns, but everytime we find a computer, the pictures don't work. Papa Keno's should have a large map up on their wall, and if we can send a few pictures in email, he should be updating our route as we've gone along and have them on his wall.

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The starting line was wild, with everybody in high spirits. Everybody and all their families wanted pictures of us in our outfits, so the flatlanders will be viewed all around the world. We rolled up blasting Born in the USA which the Spaniards got a kick out of. They also loved how our car is painted like a giant Spanish flag. Everybody you meet on the rally is instantly a best friend because they are already as crazy as we are. Some of the vehicles were ridiculous. One team had a bracket mounted to their car and were carving up a cured ham leg for everybody. Another team had an ambulance which had a huge sound system, a guitar, amp, and 240 red bulls. All their windows had huge decals of pictures of them looking out of the windows. http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... ![Image](http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/e... We drove to the border of Italy the first night and slept in a parking lot by a toll booth. The Italian coast road consisted of bridges and tunnels in succesion with little villages nestled in the valleys by the coast. We took a beautiful mountain road that made a 1 hour drive take 4 hours since we could only go 25 mph around hairpain curves. we found a man's wallet with 300 euro, a 1200 euro check, pictures of his family, and his drivers and taxi license. We took it to a police station in the mountains, and we got a message a few days ago thanking us for returning it, and now we have a place to stay in Genova if we ever come back. We drove to Kremsmunster that night and stayed in the oldest Monastary in Austria. Our friends from team Hivazur were staying there, as one guy had studied in the monastary for a year when he was 12. He gave us a room to ourselves and said if anybody asks, just tell them that our families had been friends for years. I'm glad that it didn't come to that, because we would have felt bad lying to monks. One of his friends gave us lots of beer, salad, bread, cheese, and excellent sausage that his great aunt makes.

The party in Czech was crazy with hundreds of drunk men and only 10 females to curb any sort of drunk behavior. We saw ridiculous vehicles including a large pink ice cream truck, and a fire truck covered in red fur. People were dressed as knights, and moonmen, and everybody got rip-roaring drunk. Sadly some people broke the head off a 500 year old statue, and then somebody stole the head so it can never be repaired. Some people also drew penises on the sides of all the 4x4s. They may be against the rally, but people can get shot for driving in the middle east with things like that on their cars, and many teams had to spray paint over the damage in strange colors.

We met a team consisting of a guy from barcelona named Pablo, and an over-sexed Canadian woman named Wendy with a Swiss passport, who had lived in Spain for 20 years. She is filthy, crazy, loves to party, and is exactly the type of person we love being around. Pablo has never traveled, and one night we heard him playing an Indiana Jones video game in his tent. He's in for a shock on this trip I'm sure. Our first night we rolled into Klagenfurt too late for anything to be open, and we met an incredibly nice couple from Canada who went out of their way to drive us to different guest houses to find a bed for the night. The man, Bernhard, had grown up in Klagenfurt, and he met his wife Gail in India, and they live in Alberta now. They are busy setting up a nature retreat near a lake in Alberta at the moment.

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We ended up in a weinerschnitzel place and a Turkish guy named Ataman was working. We joked about sleeping on his floor, and after thinking about it for a second, he said, "well my wife is on holiday, and i have a big room, so yes!" He closed the shop at 2, took us to his house where we met his son, then headed back to the shop til 4. We awoke to him apologizing for only have some groceries to feed us, since his wife normally does the cooking. We had bread, ham, cheeses, eggs, olives, an d tea, and he had the nerve to apologize. On top of that, he had been in the hospital that night because neo-nazis had come to the shop at 330 and beat him up because he is Muslim. The man is a king.

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From there we drove down to Croatia through Slovenia. We stopped in the most beautiful national park i've ever been in, Plitvice, which consists of crystal clear green, grey, and turqouise lakes that cascade into each other. We then drove down the coast and camped by the sea, where i had my first experience swimming in the Adriatic. It was the clearest and calmest sea I'd ever seen, and the water is so salty that you float right on the top. It had been a few days already, and we needed to cover more ground, so we drove through croatia, bosnia, croatia again, and into Montenegro. The road in Montenegro was gorgeous with massive mountians falling right into the bay. We camped again and then did a massive 24+ hour drive so we could get to Turkey, since our visa starts in azcerbaijan on the 31st and we only have 3 days to leave their country.

We went through montenegro into Albania for some of the craziest driving i've ever experienced. They have only been driving for 10 years, since only government officials were allowed to drive up until then. There are no lanes, no rules, and traffic signals mean absolutley nothing. We came off a mountain that had no guardrails, nearly hit a donkey, and saw an Italian rally team that is doing the whole trip on Vespas. They are planning on a mid-september finish, and they are our new heros. They treated us to a beer, and then we kept going. We drove to the border where we were charged a 2 euro "american tax", then into macedonia. At the border of macedonia we were hassled when trying to leave because we had no green card for the car, and after stamping us through and we stopped to talk to pablo and wendy about the green card, the guard came up and said we had 5 seconds to get to the other border before there was a problem. We rolled in Greece, and then i slept for about 5 hours while andrew hallucinated with lack of sleep until the sun came up. We departed our friends, and then I drove us into Turkey.

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We met another team at the border of turkey and rolled into Instanbul with them where we're at now. We wish we could stay longer, but Turkey is huge, and we need to make some more ground to get to Georgia. A guy at a shop set us up with a place to stay right next to where we parked, and we found 6 other rally teams on the street where we are, right near the Blue Mosque. The first guy gave us tea, then asked us if we know a good killer, because a guy who walked by isn't living by the code of merchants here, and he said that he needs to be killed. Strange. But the guy we were talking to was incredibly nice. Then Andrew and I became friends with some antique dealers who also own a restaurant and spent the whole night talking to them. They came us tea, and a dessert, and Andrew talked to them about cameras. They are fantastic people, and they are actually letting me us their computer right now.

I really wish that my entry i wrote the first time was still with us, because it was much more detailed, and probalby more entertaining. I'm keeping a detalied journal, so perhaps I will just have to write a book when I get back. Anybody know any good publishers? As always, thanks for staying tuned, and hopefully we will find internet more often, but then again, as we get into Georgia, Azcerbaijan, and Khazakstan, we will probably be running into the same problems, so we will do the best we can.

---Team Flatlanders---