Pathfinders plot behind the Iron Curtain

Winter dusk is closing in on the
motorway between Gyor and Budapest.
A travel-stained British car races towards
the Hungarian capital: in the front
passenger seat a quietly-spoken man
talks urgently into a tape recorder.
His accent is German; the information
he tapes - largely unknown in the west -
concerns the structure and working of a
vital link in the Magyar road system…

It sounds like the opening of a spy-thriller - but it is not. The three-man team inside the car were AA route loggers, and they were nearly half-way through a 3000-mile trip which, last year, took them from Basingstoke to Budapest and back, passing through seven countries on the way.

The information they collected may not have anything to do with the political balance of power, but nonetheless it is certain to be vital to some of the million AA members who annually turn to the Association for recommended travel routes.

The object of the route logging trip is to up-date the AA's route maps and travel publications. This means exploring new stretches of road, measuring the distances between towns, noting the efficiency of signposting, and reporting on road conditions. In addition there is a host of information to be culled - like the quality of hotel accommodation along the way, traffic systems inside cities and towns, and the availability of services.

The man with the tape-recorder was German-born Gerard Ostkamp, a senior route planner in the AA's Publications Research Unit. Seventeen years with the Association, it was 43-year-old Ostkamp's fourth foreign logging trip (usually there are two such journeys each year), and he still found it a lively experience.

For one thing there was the business of making sense of the maze of European signposts. A typical problem occurred on the Passau to Linz leg in Austria. There are two possible routes, the more direct (and until now recommended by the AA) E5 and the 130 which winds along the south bank of the Danube. 'You would expect the E5, one of the main European arteries, to be the superior road. But in fact the Danube route is far better, which makes it a pity that the other should still carry its major road number.'

The trio then set out along the E5 themselves to experience the worst at first hand. They found that the road was a patchwork of repairs made necessary by frost, that the quality of surface varied wildly from repair to repair, that this work had at points overlaid the road markings, and that while the road was standard width (about 20 feet) it appeared narrower because there were no clearly defined edges. In short it was no longer suited to fast motoring, and in future, AA road information will give the motorist warning of this.

Knowing the distances between points on a route is of particular importance to the motorist planning a trip. The loggers set out to provide this as well - but it's not always so easy.
In Austria, for example, the smaller towns tend to sprawl; there is no clearly-marked town centre from which to measure. Ostkamp's answer was to watch out for a church (there almost always was one) and take that as a reference mark. Otherwise it was necessary to measure the difference between the sign which marked entry into a town and that which signalled exit from it, and split the difference to find a 'geometric' centre.

The width of roads is obviously also important to the traveller. The standard width is about six metres (twenty feet), anything under that and the motorist has problems when it comes to passing a large lorry. Hence another regular measurement job for the loggers: it sounds easy, but the reality is different when you have to dodge out of the way of a succession of screaming leviathans - while keeping a foot on your tape measure.

In the four days (Vienna to Zagreb) that 'Drive' accompanied the loggers, the majority of the driving was done by John Denby, at 24 the youngster of the logging party.
Denby's other big contribution was in getting the party's Hillman Hunter back on the road after it broke down in Germany, towards the end of the trip. The car had first played up near Kaiserslautern three days before, when there had been a gradual loss of power. A committed DIY motor mechanic, Denby suppressed his desire to get at the job himself, and took the car into an Autobahn Service Station. The mechanic took a look, and prescribed new points and plugs.

These were fitted - with apparent efficiency. But only a few miles further on the trouble reasserted itself and got steadily worse. The party limped on to Koblenz and there Denby could bear it no longer. He got to work at 5am the following morning - and found that in carrying out his repair work the German mechanic had almost sheared through the lead to the condenser. Once proper contact had been re-established the Hunter was back in business, and on the road.

'The kind of help you will get from a Continental garage is a matter of chance, unless you go to an accredited service agent.' Denby says. 'Otherwise, in my experience, you can't expect a foreign mechanic to know as much about a British car as he does about his own country's vehicles. So one thing stands out: it's vital to have your car thoroughly serviced before you cross the Channel.

Hotel inspection was the job of Arthur Horwood. A research writer, he has spent forty-one of his fifty-nine years with the AA.
His attitude to his job is one of good-humoured persistence. He feels that inevitably a hotel reflects the personality of its owner or manager. Thus when he discovered that the Walfisch Hotel in Würzburg, West Germany, sported a lively collection of wallpapers on its walls, he was not altogether surprised to find that the owner actually collected wallpaper. 'But it went a lot deeper than that,' says Horwood. 'The fact that he was prepared to stick his prized papers on the walls reflected his pride in the place. But it also showed in food quality, in the attractive presentation, and the comfort of the rooms.'

Horwood's two cardinal rules for hotel booking on the Continent are: book early (even out of the tourist season many hotels are heavily booked); and get there well before 7pm, or your room may be gone.

Horwood believes that you can tell a great deal about the likely standards of a hotel even before you enter. Are the windows clean? Is the entrance properly swept? If they are, there's a good chance the place will be all right. Once inside, the attitude of the staff - alert or disinterested - is an important pointer, too. But if there is any jarring note in your first impressions, he advises that the room offered should be inspected before it is taken.

On the road Horwood inspected service stations. He found them clean and well equipped, and the shops well stocked, though the goods were more expensive than in ordinary shops.

Apart from the hard travel information the team collected that will eventually be channelled through to the AA membership via services and publications, they also learned some more general lessons that the tourist would do well to remember:
Like … when an eagle-eyed customs man demands the opening of your sealed box of spares, don't argue - he'll just decide it's full of heroin, and will have it opened anyway.
Like … if you value your AA and GB badges, don't park in a busy city street overnight - they'll disappear, along with the car's name-plate.
Like … treat hotel balconies with caution. When the trio strolled on to the balcony of their room in Budapest one bright morning, a piece of the masonry promptly broke away and smashed down into the road below.
Nobody looked to see where it had landed. They just left the balcony - and quickly. After all, they still had 1700 miles to do.

Peter Williams
From Drive Magazine, Number 29, Spring 1974

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