Mazda MX-5 2.0 Sport Nav

How a bolt from the blue prompted a road trip to remember

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EVER SINCE I BOUGHT THE MX-5 LAST March, I'd been thinking about an appropriate road trip, but work and other grownup stuff just kept getting in the way. Then one evening last autumn came a phone call from my sister Claire that instantly put all those things into proper perspective. Her partner Jim, who we've known for 25-plus years, had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, the full Sir Chris Hoy.

It would mean months of chemo and radiotherapy to keep it in check, but meantime Jim had been hatching a plan. When the initial round of treatment was over, which would take us to May of this year, he wanted to do a family road trip: three couples, a week spent driving down through France and touring the wine-growing regions of northern Spain. And so 'Road to Rioja' was born.

Routes, rooms and winery tours were scheduled. Mrs T and I would be in the MX-5, while Jim and Claire would take their Mercedes SLK. My elder sister Jane and her husband Nigel toyed with buying a sports car specially for the trip, but in the end elected to take their spanking new BMW iX3. Which would mean three things. One, we'd have somewhere to put any extra cases of wine (excellent). Two, we'd have to make lots of extra stops when range anxiety inevitably set in (not quite so good). And three, the BeeEm would be shunted into the background - or completely out of the frame - for most of the pics (annoying for Nigel, hilarious for the rest of us).