Wednesday 2 May 2018

DRIVE IT DAY

What a glorious day for a trip to Glorious Goodwood. The sky was clear blue, but we started off with the hood up as it had poured with rain over night and the hood needed to dry out before I could lower it. I don't usually leave the car out of its garage, but we were been baby sitting overnight in Reigate and planned to drive directly to Denbies Vineyard in Dorking from Reigate.

The Croydon Rotary Club were organising this run and check in to Denbies was from 9am allowing time to collect the excellent route guide to Goodwood and for coffee and a bacon butty. With the roof lowered, we left at about 10.20, with stewards reminding us to zero our trip meter. Jacquie was a super navigator as she read out the instructions, automatically adjusting the distances as I occasionally mentioned the difference between the trip meter and the instructions. point four of a mile was the total run out after the 63 mile route.

We didn't miss a turn, plenty of other cars did, but we turned into Levant Corner at Goodwood a little over two hours from the start, having driven through some lovely Surrey and Sussex villages and waving to many other classic cars coming towards us heading to unknown destinations.



On our two previous visits to Goodwood for the Revival, the place had been rammed, so it was a little strange to wander onto the empty race track and around the paddocks, it was a little ghostly. We had a light lunch, watched a few planes take off and land and headed back to Stella for an equally enjoyable and fortunately uneventful drive back. I did have to anchor up sharply, at one point though, as a Sunday driver, not a classic driver, decided to pull out in front of me, but a satisfying squeal of rubber brought a sheepish wave of apology from the driver and a complimentary comment from Jacquie, "Stops well doesn't she". The only issue is that the temperature gauge stopped working, but that is only a gauge issue as Stella showed no sign of overheating.

All bodes well for our next big outing in Stella, which will be a five day trip to North Wales at the end of June, fingers crossed that the weather is as good as it was last year when we toured Mid Wales.

Sadly no pictures of Stella as my phone ran out of battery just as I started to zoom in, sorry!