I knew it, the Herminator arrived at the hotel early in the morning for our ultimate drive to PARIS nicely in time! No stress. This is a 282 km drive… a piece of cake. The 600 km days are still in our system so whatever. Let’s do this.

That morning I got up at 5 AM and took the Contal to the Menenpoort (you know, from ‘the last post‘). It just looked good, all alone, this little machine, in front of this imposant building. Then it dawned on me. We are at the last day of the rally. Day 36! I thought it would never arrive, now it is there. Since St Petersburg things went faster then expected. Nice.

The drive to Paris was without problems, if you don’t count the French Capital’s traffic. What a mess… But after 14.000 kilometers I knew what I could do with the Contal and we drove swift past every obstacle as we did in Mongolia. No river deep enough, no mountain high enough to keep us away from the Place Vendôme. Shit no. As these things go, the glorious arrival was quick and over before we knew it. But the taste was so sweet.

Our twenty seconds of fame were quickly over but the sweet taste remained. The organisation asked us to move up for the next competitor and again, that is how these things go. Never mind… I looked behind me for the last time and realised Herman and I drove into history. The passing of the checkered flag introduced us to a different world: the world were men made a difference. Where the one stone that was replaced in the river changed the course of the water forever. On the scope of the world the prove that a threewheeler can drive from Peking to Paris might be relatively unimportant, but for us and all enthousiasts of the Peking to Paris legend this means the final chapter on the 1907 original edition. There was ONE unfinished story. We finished it. Un hommage at the two bravest P2P’ers that ever lived: Auguste Pons and Oscar Foucauld.