Just caught this (better late than never!) and quite fascinating to watch. 1971 - quite a while ago now, but I think that time must have been the sweet spot between it being a real dirt road slog with unreliable vehicles - as portrayed in Nicholas Bouvier's book The Way of the World, where, in 1952, he and a friend drove a gradually disintegrating Fiat Topolino from France to the Kyber Pass - and the later (and current) era of closed borders, political restrictions and military tension.

What was great for me was at 2mins 10secs to glimpse some of the old yellow AA route guide books. I used to have a complete set of them back then and very handy they were in those pre Google Maps days. I tried to track some copies down about four years ago for our retro tour to Morocco in 2022 and it took the best part of twelve months to find the ones covering France and Spain. One of them came from a secondhand bookshop in the Hebrides and another from a shop on Dartmoor. I'm still looking for the one that covered Italy and the map that told you which route went where. Picture of one of the French books below

As for how young we all looked in 1971, the years, as the lady in the video observed, do take their toll . Four of us rode two bikes overland from London to Athens (and back!) that year. This is one of the bikes on the Brenner Pass.