A nice day here too.

[Hasbeen]

Any of you had a great drive recently?

Sunday morning was absolutely beautiful, about 22 C at our 8.45 AM start of a Triumph club run. 3 nice 7s including mine among the mixed bag, including a 2500S sedan, & a Stag, just driven up from Adelaide, 2200 Kilometres from here, by it's new owner.

Fantastic run on country back roads, with virtually no traffic, gave the opportunity for some spirited driving. This included the locally famous Lions road. This was built with volunteer labour of mostly farmers, & funded by the Lions clubs in towns either side of the Queensland New South Wales border. The farmers in far north NSW were a long way from markets, & this road, built with pick, shovel & horses & carts, allowed them access to Queensland markets. It would be hard to find tighter turns onto narrow bridges anywhere.

There were even some interesting vehicles at the little rest area we stopped at for morning tea. Nice lunch at a country pub in the struggling town of Kyogle. Many of our smaller country towns are struggling for relevance, now road transport to larger centres is so easy.

The afternoon was the real fun. Back through the border ranges, even the first 40 kilometres of the Mount Lindsay Highway is a series of 40 to 75 kilometre twists & turns. Much of this road is recently rebuilt, & resurfaced with stone mastic hot mix bitumen. This stuff is very smooth, but remains somewhat oily for some time, & quite slippery when wet.

Wouldn't you know one of our typical spring thunderstorm dropped between an inch & 2 or 3 inches on it just as we arrived. There was quite a bit of slip sliding away for a while. My new Kumho tyres were OK, but that's all. These are the first conditions I've found when they are inferior to the Michelin & Pirellis I used to use before they stopped making suitable tyres in 13 inch.

We have some great Triumph club runs here, on great roads, but this one, with a bit of almost everything was one of the best I can remember, & a great day was had by all.

Hasbeen

[FI Spyder]

Being on the other side of the page we are getting ready for the wet season being held off (for now) by the warm "blob" (yes that's what it's called) far off the coast in the middle of the north Pacific coupled with the cyclical El Nino that gives us higher and dryer than normal weather. Working on the Toyota and some wheel well rust spots to get it back on the road.

For club runs we have those narrow winding roads, ignoring the Trans Canada Highway (yes it starts on the island, Mile 0 being at waters edge in Victoria) between small towns struggling for relevance now that the mines have played out and the lumber mills struggle as companies prefer to ship whole logs the the States and Asia and the pulp mills are up against it as paper use is down with the internet taking the place of newspapers and China ramps up their paper mills. They are going for the artistic bent with art, music festivals, tourism and thanks to having the mildest weather in Canada, and the retirement crowd (as the baby boomers ramp up that segment) with reasonable housing prices. The only fly in the ointment is the ferry prices with calls for making it a subsidized part of the road system but the traffic problems of a fast growing Vancouver sucking up the many hundreds of millions of dollars from the provincial and federal governments.