You see, we got lost and we did not have any route description, (late back from the petrol station and just in time to empty the luggage from the hotel room and move our cars in front of Jan Groen who was closing the line). I had my 3 year old daughter Julia sitting next to me and Helen was driving the Giulia with our 1.5 year old son Maarten in the childseat on the front bench.

After some 30 Km we were the tail of the string of Spiders and then we met some traffic lights. Getting more than 50 Spiders through a green traffic light in Holland is as impossible as finding mountains of 1000 meters in Holland. So when we were through at the next T crossing, no other Spiders! My mobile phone was dead so I could not call Rony or Cobi. Luckily we had someone else with a phone who managed to call her and get some directions of where to go, but they were clearly not used to reading a map. So then the kids were tired and started crying, we had a rain downpour I have hardly ever seen etc. etc. etc.

You can say that almost everything went wrong that day. But still I enjoyed it a lot!! Anyway, the spareribs and beer made up for the tough day.

Also happy to see that my 62 Giulia was in there as well. It is very hard to drive fast compared to the Spider. It has a 92 hp 1600 cc engine and a 5 speed gearbox that is operated via a column shift. Acceleration is OK, but getting it around corners is hard work. You can imagine that Helen had very tired arms after following a bunch of idiots in blazing Spiders!!
Joost and Helen Hillemans

This is the Hillemans' Spider

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