Bathurst to Gundagai
Day 1. It’s 6:15am and we’re all heading to our cars to start our 6 day adventure. It’s a cold Bathurst morning and we’re all thinking about coffee and breakfast. We jump in and head to our first stop 2 hours away in Young.
The roads out of Bathurst aren’t particularly exciting – normally this would be made even worse for me considering I only managed 2 hours sleep the night before, but there’s plenty of adrenaline in my veins to keep me pumped. We’re lucky to have a nice clear day although we do experience a light shower in the morning which clears up quite quickly. I’m feeling particularly excited and taking lots of photos and videos as I go. For a city boy like me, seeing the lush green hills is quite a site for sore eyes, but seeing through a convoy of classic Mercedes-Benz cars is just superb.
In Young we stop for breakfast at Wilders Bakery, just like we had planned. We gather around the table and talk about our lives. It doesn’t take long however for the conversation to be centred around our cars as it often does with this group of gentlemen. It’s at this time, that I notice that the weather is looking particularly fine. For me that means all windows down and sunroof open. The 380SEC’s pillarless cabin really becomes light and airy with everything open. Almost (but let’s be honest, it’s not the same) like a convertible. For Matt, it means top down, while Joel, John and Harley also opted to go with windows down in their pillarless coupes.
As we head out of Young, it’s amazing the attention these cars get. Some passers by strike up a conversation with Matt about his convertible just as we’re about to leave. There’s plenty of admiring glances and thumbs ups for our little convoy. Young has been welcoming to us.
We head out of Young and make our way to the next stop – the Gundagai Railway museum, about 1 hour and 15 minutes away. As we head out of young, it doesn’t take long for the scenery to turning into magnificent rolling hills intertwined by some of the finest driving roads I’ve ever experienced. Since our objective is to avoid the major highways as much as possible, we found ourselves taking Burra Rd into Gundagai.
To the locals I’m sure it’s nothing special. It’s a particularly narrow road barely wide enough for 1 vehicle. So just as well we only had to pass a handful of cars. But once underway what we found was a magnificent piece of tarmac with challenging curves and great visibility – especially with the warm spring weather we were experiencing. We’re always looking out for each other so using our 2-way radios we were able to warn each other if there was any oncoming traffic or other obstacles to be aware of. Something that started on our last trip and continues on throughout this trip.
We finally arrived at the Gundagai Railway Museum and had a look around. It was at this point, that I thought I would clean up the memory card on my Go Pro. I had taken some footage of my centre console by accident and wanted to free up the space. I selected some photos and clicked Delete. “Do you want to delete 100 photos?”, “Sure”. Long pause, “Do you want to delete 99 photos?”, “OK”, “SD Card contains no data!” WTF?? I lost all the photos I had taken.
This is why, up until this point, I have not shown any photos.
Luckily as Bryce cheerfully pointed out, this happened at the start of the trip and not at the end. By this point we were getting ready to leave the railway museum, so I took a few quick pics and got back in the car for out next leg.
Unforutnately due to dodgy wifi / 5G, I’m unable to upload the pics right now, but I’ll do that at the first chance I get.
Onwards and upwards! Next leg, Gunadgai to Tumbarumba
It’s only an hour an 15 minutes for this next leg, but when you have a convoy of 10 cars things get a little complicated. The group effectively gets split into 2 packs as half the group enjoys a more leisurely pace. We head off as a single group, but since there’s so many of us, we can’t always merge into traffic as a single unit and other cars often get caught up in the middle our convoy.
Since Tumbarumba is quite a small town we decided to split up. Some of the guys from the first group finished breakfast and went to refuel from 2 different servos. The plan was that we’d all go get fuel and then meet back at the Tumbarumba bakery. I finished my breakfast and went off to refuel. While I was there I decided to check my tyres since they were a little low and also my fluid levels since I do have a minor transmission leak. I refuelled and completed my checks before heading back to the bakery.
As I was heading back I heard on our radio that they’re heading off and taking the Albury turnoff. I headed down that route but didn’t see anyone – although I could hear them on the radio. After driving a couple of kilometers and not finding the group, I received a phone call from one of the guys asking where I was. To put it simply, there was a bit of confusion and I turned back and headed towards the bakery. Then on another route, before finally realising, that they did take the Albury exist but were about another 1km up from where I turned back.
This set us back a good 20 minutes, but everyone was in good spirits as we continued on.
Tumbarumba to Cobram – The final leg of Day 1
We headed off from Tumbarumba and made our way towards Albury following the mighty Murray River. Absolutely breathtaking scenes as we navigated our way around, before taking a break at Mount Alfred for a photo opportunity. One of the drivers in the convoy – Kanwal – also happens to be the club photographer. So he’s always up for a photoshoot at a scenic location.
There’s lots more photos, but this is all I managed to upload on the sketchy wifi and 5G networks in Cobram.
Being on the banks of the Murray River means that this is some of the most fertile land in the country and as we’re well into spring, the natural beauty of the area is just breathtaking!
With the photos taken care of, we drove off for another 20 minutes or so before we had to make an unscheduled stop. Bryce had a small incident with his rubber muffler mounts breaking leaving his muffler dangling under the rear of the car. It’s times like this when you appreciate comradarie we have on this trip. We all banded together to offer Bryce any help that we could. Everyone looking into their box of spares to see what we could offer in the way of help. Finally, it was Matt’s hose clamps that did a satisfactory job of keeping the muffler in place. It’s not a perfect solution, but certainly adequate to keep the convoy moving for another 5 days. As we pulled out I was right behind Bryce and could see that the muffler was firmly in place. It wasn’t moving at all.
From here we started on the final stretch for the day. For me this was the most exhausting. Since I was lacking sleep from the night before I really struggled with this leg. To make matter worse, I wasn’t able to listen to any podcasts or music for the first half of it due to a weird glitch in my car radio. It turned out to be user error as I had inadvertently plugged the USB cable directly into my phone instead of the charging cradle I usually use. I blame it on the lack of sleep.
Along the way we managed to lose Peter who phoned and instructed us to keep moving on. It would later turn out that he had made a wrong turn that set him back over an hour compared to the rest of the convoy.
We finally made it to Cobram (the same place they make Cobram Olive Oil) and after quickly checking into our rooms we headed off next door for dinner. Peter and his Nephew Nick joined us when they finally made it down as we shared out nightly meal filled with laughs, good friends and lots of stories.
All up we covered over 650Km on Day 1. Tomorrow we cover around 750Km as we head from Cobram to Horsham taking in some silo art and stopping for more photo opportunities.
