So today turned out to be a hot and blowy day and as a consequence I guess, numbers were down a bit on some previous cruises, we would have started the day with three Mighty Boys, a Super Carry and a very tall Sierra, but two interesting things occurred...
Our starting place and time co-incided with a local cruise organised by some guys from the Victorian Mini Car Club (one of whom I knew), and so after a few minutes of chatting with them, they decided to pull the pin on their cruise and join us... So we swelled to 5 Suzukis and (I think) 2 Morris Minis and a Leyland Clubman.
So at about 10:10 we left the starting point, and hadn't been on the road for 5 minutes when suddenly out of a side-street another Mighty Boy joined in!
As it turned out, the cruise route I had mapped out went right past the front door of the Mini owner I knew, so he asked if we could stop there for a minute or two so his daughter could also join in.
Now we were 6 Suzukis & 5 Minis.
The drive was fairly uneventful - we made our way from Bayswater across to Ferntree Gully where we picked up Burwood Highway and then the Mount Dandenong Tourist Road. From here it was pretty well all uphill - 3rd gear and 2nd on some corners until we got to Tremont (which is the top of the hill). Not content with pushing our little cars up the hill once in 37 degree heat, I soon lead the guys down some windy leafy back roads to Kalista where we could then head back up the hill along more windy, twisty steep roads...
Once we got to Olinda, we peeled off to the right and made our way towards Monbulk and on toward Yellingbo. If I hadn't taken a wrong turn, we wouldn't have seen the lovely Macclesfield (sorted that out) and finally arrived at Yellingbo. Here we took a short break (read toilet stop) and innundated the little country milkbar to raid them of Ice-creams and other cold delights...
Back on the road from Yellingbo, it was a fairly straight-forward process to find our way to Seville and then on to Mount Evelyn before picking our way through to Croydon and finally back to the start in Bayswater, returning about 12:45.
We had a few moments of concern as we came into Croydon - one of the cars developed a bit of an electrical stutter to the fuel pump which as you can imagine caused in turn, a bigger stutter of the whole car... But with two rolling stop/starts we got back to the starting point where we sorted that out in short order before he drove across town to home.
I'm sure the Mini guys had a nice day of it - they all thanked us for allowing them to tag along... We discovered another Mighty Boy owner (or perhaps more correctly - he discovered us!) who, we all suggested join Tamon... and had a great day - if a little warm.
A few pics are here:
http://www.tamon.org/gallery/v/members/Tez/Jan10/
Cheers
P.S. - For those interested - The elapsed time was about 2 hours 35 minutes where Google had suggested 2h 18min, but Google hadn't factored in the 10 minutes or so we stopped for the Mini to join us, or the 15 or so minutes we lost coz I went the wrong way, or the 20 minutes Loo stop in Yellingbo. If we had not made all those stops, we would have smashed Google's time by a good half hour I reckon, and we were not hammering along at all...