Parting of the ways

This morning we had our first setback. It started as a somewhat surreal experience, in which we were overtaken by our trailer.

The trailer is a handsomely crafted affair, created by cutting a second Fiat Panda in half. This essentially gave us a complete spare rear-axle and rear suspension to have with us, and we filled the trailer with all the Fiat engine and front suspension spares from the cannibalised front half... Essentially, we had almost a complete spare car with us. Anyway, we were blasting quite happily along a roadworks-strewn Lower Silesian highway somewhere near Wroclaw when it happened...

Crunch! Thump! Screech!

The first strange noise was the NATO hitch jaw breaking away from the rear crossmember of the car. The roadsurface had been causing us horrendous vibration for some time, being a bit like driving over tarmacked corrugated iron for an hour or so, Finally, metal fatigue had set in, and the hitch mounting had torn away from the crossmember.

At the "Crunch" sound, I had braked, almost by reflex. At which point the car slowed and the free'd trailer's momentum took it whistling past us, dodging nimbly through a gap and over onto the newly built other carriageway, ending up ahead of us, still upright, completely unscathed.

We later discovered that the "Thump" sound was the trailer hitch smashing into the rear axle when I slowed... (an action that, incidentally, demolished the rear brake pipes,) and the "Screech" was the nice long gouge in the road surface evidencing its subsequent path of travel. Well, no amount of gaffer tape was going to rejoin the front Panda to its rear Half-Panda. We had no real choice, given time pressure, other than to abandon the trailer (suitably anonymised) in the adjacent forest, along with much of its payload. Sigh!