The ultimate road trip

Brothers Robert and Mark Wilkinson swung through Sonoma on Bastille Day in their 1926 British racing green Bentley roadster.  The Wilkinsons are from Britain’s Midlands and have undertaken what many would proclaim the ultimate road trip – crossing the United States in the Bentley without the benefit of using any interstate highways.

While in Sonoma, the brothers stayed with Gayle Jenkins at Les Petities Maisons cottages and visited the Tuesday Night Farmers Market before setting off for Alaska.  After a brief stay on the tundra, the Bentley will be shipped to Ecuador to begin a sojourn through South America, concluding in Brazil, and then on to Australia for a road trip Down Under before finally being shipped to China.  The only time restriction facing the brothers is that they must be in Beijing by May 28 to begin the 2013 Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge, a 10,000-mile endurance race spanning a full month on the road.  The race originated in 1907 but was not re-run until 2005.

Organized by the Endurance Rally Association, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge, limited to vintage or classic cars, begins at the Great Wall of China, moves through Inner and Outer Mongolia (via the Gobi Desert), across Asian and European Russia, across the Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Austria, and Switzerland then on through France to Paris – a true test one’s powers of resolve and the human spirit.