The Mountain
After many years of watching the “great race” the 50th Anniversary of the 1000 combined with a proposed road-trip with some good people from the oldschool.co.nz forums lead to me finally attending the event. Although it was not so simple as showing up, it never is.
The plan was to fly into Brisbane a few days before-hand and meet some people, talk some crap, drink some liquor and then roll down to Sydney to see more people before embarking on the final leg to Bathurst itself. However, the two classic wagons that were to be our steeds weren’t quite ready to be broken by their masters just yet.
I got into Brisbane on the Sunday evening, a day after D. who had already spent two days solid helping Spencer with his Buick Estate Wagon and no doubt giving Sam a hand with his Ford Country Sedan also. Phil picked me up from the airport and after I sussed out what was going down on arrival, I got stuck in too, so much to be done with such little time. Spencer had only just got the car back from being painted a little while before-hand and the motor had been put together mere days before I arrived. It had been running once to check the timing, etc.
Unfortunately I was far too busy during the build to take pictures of the progress, it wasn’t until we had got the car a roadworthy and a new set of plates that I had found the time to take a photograph.
Spencer’s Steeds; The legal Buick with a parts donating XF Utility in the Background
Though hard to see in the photograph, if you look closely at the RHS of the firewall you’ll notice an grey section. To this piece of steel is mounted the wiper motor from the XF in the background, it took a lot of fucking about with the original motor before giving up and turning to the XF and even then there were all kinds of issues and delays but we did sort it along with everything else and we got that baby ready to rock.
With both cars getting a few last minute things done, we left only an hour or so after that photograph was taken, of course we were in Brisbane who do not utilise any form of daylight savings time and an hour after then it was dark, so started the 1,100km journey south.
Night-time departure
As the sun started to rise again over the horizon, we were getting a lot closer to the target destination.
Highway Rolling
260km to Sydney with sleep deprived Pilots and Passengers everywhere.
With only stops for refueling of both cars and people, we arrived sleepless in Penrith to meet the other contingent of NZ folks. With some shuffling of luggage and passengers due to various reasons, we rolled over the Blue Mountains towards Bathurst.
Traversing a Mountain to get to a Mountain, that’s how we roll.
A less sleep deprived driver, Mr. k-trips, formerly of ZZ-Top.
Once we hit Bathurst we set up camp, got some liquor and then settled in for the night, trying to drink a little before the attempted catch up on a missed night of sleep (the first).
Camp-site (excuse the Holden’s detrimental aesthetics)
I’ll leave it at that for now, prepare for more in the coming days. I’ll try get it all down and documented whilst it’s relatively fresh in my memory.
-Michael
