Bondi to the Baltic - Year 3: the Baltic Sea at last.

After 20,000 km from Thailand, across central Asia to Finland in 2014 and 2015, Bill Amann’s dogged little Whippet (named Stan, after his previous long time owner, Stan Perry) had earned a long rest. It had survived six months driving with regular overheating, several broken springs, permanently severed shock absorbers, makeshift exhaust repairs, loosened wooden wheel-spokes, slashed inner tubes, and many fuel, carburettor and electrical fixes.

A cosy shed in rural Finland has been a welcome home for the past year. Then in August 2016 the shed doors creaked open and the little Willys Whippet blinked in the sunshine. A check of fuel, cooling and electrical systems, a bit of air in the tyres, wheels back on, and the 90 year old motor spluttered back into life.

This time it's on to the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to finally complete the “Bondi to the Baltic” expedition. By an alliterative error we had previously misnamed our ambitious vintage car road trip from Australia to Finland (should have been “Hanoi to Helsinki” but for the Vietnamese government taking its leftist political system to the absurdity of even banning right hand drive cars), causing us to apologise to the Finns for misplacing them on a map of European seas. But now to the real Baltic.