Charlotte Vowden, Journalist
After plans for an epic drive fell through, journalist Charlotte Vowden realised her Favourite Detour is anywhere that her, her father and her MGA go together.
“A road trip doesn’t always have to be all beautiful photo opportunities and stuff like that. It can be whatever you want it to be.”
“We were going to drive to the base camp of Mount Everest. We would have been setting off from Bangkok, and driving around between six and 7,000 miles in total, and we would have gone through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and through mainland China for about 21 days, and then through Tibet and down to Nepal. We would have been about ten weeks on the road.
It was really exciting. There were a lot of challenges, but we'd done our research and the risks were calculated. The car was due to be put in a container to be shipped out, when the Coronavirus story started breaking in the news. It was the last day we had the car in our possession. We were doing final checks and found a crack in the radiator. So my dad had to get up really early the next morning to get to the parts place in South London pick it up, come home, and fix the rad in the car. All these things were going wrong and then you've got the radio in the background saying all this stuff about the virus and, bearing in mind we were supposed to be in China for 20 days, it was worrying. Still, we took the car down to Felixstowe where it was going to be shipped to Thailand. And then I think it was about 10 days later, my dad and I discussed it and decided it was just too dangerous, so we went back to collect it.
I had inherited my car, a 1960 MGA from my late grandfather and I thought I've got to do something massive because this car is 60 years old. I wanted to make something of it, to show what these cars can do. They're very, very precious, but they can also be used. I really wanted a challenge, to do something significant to mark this milestone year for the car.
So I think I went through a bit of a mourning process for what could have been. But actually, in 2020 you just have to do what you can do, so on the car’s 60th birthday my dad and I circumnavigated the M25 because that's all we could do given the lockdown restrictions.
We got up at four o'clock in the morning and drove around that horrible road full of lorries. And it was brilliant. And that's the thing. A road trip doesn't always have to be all beautiful photo opportunities and stuff like that. It can be whatever you want it to be. And that can mean so much. We didn't get to Everest, but we've still got the car, we’ve still got each other and who knows what the future holds.”
Charlotte was named Rising Star at the 2020 Historic Motoring Awards.
