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Happiness is, running out of cooking oil

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Hasbeen
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Happiness is, running out of cooking oil

Postby Hasbeen » 30 May 2011 06:39

but only if it's a nice day, & you use the 7 to go & get some.

I haven't used the 7 much in the last 6 months, once the drought broke, the rain just hasn't stopped. Some days have been quite nice, but with a few showers, & our showers are often half an inch in a few minutes, not really Triumph weather.

Thus it was a pleasure to find a reason to use the old girl, [no not the wife], on a lovely sunny but cool day.

There's not a corner that is fun, with out exceeding the speed limit by too much, but a lot of the 25Km to the nearest town has nice new bitumen, & the road sweeps through rolling countryside.

The little car sings on this run, so much so, that I took a little detour, up & down the nearby mountain plateau on the way home.

The road up the mountain from the south is known as the goat track. No engineered road, it was built by the early plateau farmers as a track to get pack horses, loaded with churns of cream down to the butter factory in the valley. Much was blasted & hacked out of a cliff face.

Over the years it has been widened to accommodate first a horse & cart, then small truck, but even today much of it is too tight for anything bigger than a five tonner. Five or six kilometers of the run is nicely twisty before the real climb starts. This starts with tight 20, & 30Km/H hairpins, with sharp steep climbs between. The 7s torque & handling just work perfectly on this bit of road.

About 3Km is one way at a time, controlled by traffic lights. Five minutes for up traffic, then five for down. A 300Ft high rock cliff on the inside, with an armco fence protecting a few hundred foot drop on the outside means it's not popular with the nervous driver. However you can imagine the effect with a nice exhaust note, it's like a tunnel, only better.

The 8 sounds great, but the 7 is not too shabby either. I was very disappointed with the "new" Honda S2,000, which just makes no use of this opportunity at all.

Along the plateau is spectacular, with the view of the valley over 1200 ft down, with the patchwork of fields of various crops. Even the fact that I was caught behind a congo line of tourists on the way down the northern end could not spoil the drive.

Some times owning a 7 is one of the best experiences you could ever ask for.

Hasbeen

FI Spyder
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Postby FI Spyder » 30 May 2011 14:02

Sounds like fun. I have two interesting drives into town, one more built up and the other rural but both twisty, rolling roads and both 60 kph. but everyone goes faster unless they spot a light bar on the top of the roof of the car coming towards you.[}:)]

There's a twisty narrow road going out to Arbutus Point on the north side of the bay that my brother said reminds him of the roads in Bermuda. A similar longer one going south to Genoa Bay. All a good excuse for warming up the oil in the TR7. With HD video becoming available in even the cheapest digital camera's, I look forward to the day when we all have links in our signatures to our favourite local drives.[8D]



TR7 Spider - 1978 Spitfire - 1976 Spitfire - 1988 Tercel 4X4 - Kali on Integra - 1991 Integra - Yellow TCT
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