The Home Stretch |
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| Leaving Crawley was like starting the Run all over again… the crowd was warmly supportive. You could really begin to feel as if you were somehow engaged in a noble undertaking… and who’s to say that’s not true? |  |
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| It was just a few miles past Crawley that we saw… and passed … Anthony Roberts and David Potts. This was a true “Genevieve” moment, because… even though the London-to-Brighton is not a race, I could swear David and Anthony looked somewhat… well, chagrined… to see us go ‘round them. Just a few miles later, we were in turn passed by a quite powerful 1904 car, which was making forward progress at an astonishing clip. Bill leaned back to me and said, “He always tries to be the first to Brighton.” Well, good luck to him, I thought. He’s still got to pass the majority of 1903, quite a bit of 1902, and perhaps few representatives of 1901 and earlier that continued to make steady progress ahead. | ||
 In “Genevieve,”
to promote the idea that the roads used were indeed somewhere between
London and Brighton (which they most definitely were not), many signposts
appear with the distance to Brighton boldly displayed. I saw but two on
the real journey, and both were quite close to Brighton. As such, they
were welcome sights, because the skies once again had started to looked
threatening. |
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 The final stretch of
road before Brighton is undeniably the most picturesque. It’s hills,
sheep, opens roads, fields, and few, if any, spectators, since people this close
to Brighton would almost certainly choose to travel the few miles to the
finish line for an excellent view. So it is here, just before Brighton,
that you get the clearest sensation of what auto travel must have been
like for those early intrepid souls who braved the elements and their
fickle motors for a ride in the English countryside.
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