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Northern Light
Everyone looks at the floor, unsure of what to say. I'm acting like a snotty child, but I can't cross the line in the support truck, not after all this.
Two-and-a-half hours later, on the fourth day of the trip, the quality of the acoustics changes inside my icy helmet and the road becomes a strip of white in absolute blackness, like an angel's bridge over some lost landscape, the Atom's lights revealing nothing but drifting snow and a strip of road.
And then I see the sign. The Arctic Circle sign. And I cross it, in an Ariel Atom, in winter. Bloody hell, we made it. With very little energy left to congratulate each other, we stay at a little truckers' guest house nearby and in the morning trek back up to the Circle to see what we missed in the dark.
'The two posts that mark the Arctic Circle's path are the only landmarks, the rest a waveform of white'
No trees, no houses, nothing. Suddenly you enter the tundra, and the bleakness and desolation is complete. But it's also incredibly, heartbreakingly beautiful.
The two posts that mark the Arctic Circle's path are the only landmarks, the rest a waveform of white, an endless sine-wave of winter in all directions.
The superlatives dry up and we're reduced to wandering around mouthing 'wow' at each other like senile goldfish. An hour of taking in the view later, and we point the cars south, ready for the return slog.
The Atom hasn't missed a beat in all these tortuous miles, the Discovery has been our warmth and refuge, our bubble of sanity. But once we made it here, we completed the puzzle, adventure complete.
It has been a vivid thing, this drive. But the only way I'm ever going to do something as daft as this again is if Hell suddenly freezes over.
And no, that's not a challenge.
Ariel Atom road tests
Ariel Atom - September 20, 2007
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