Autumn Roadtrip

Swiss Alps this was not. The Peak District this was.

To mark the fact that it could be last time Rob went out in his Mini on a decent run before it is sold, we felt the need to celebrate the occasion with a quick run out to the Peaks. Nothing serious, but enough to give us a reminder of the summer trip we’ve just had.

And how did the weather respond – by giving us probably the wettest, damp squib of an afternoon possible. Fog, mist, rain, and plenty of traffic – things we did not have over the summer.

We planned the route using a special TomTom application. Download Windows version here.

We drove in a westerly direction from my house through Owler Bar, and then headed through Castleton onto the Winnat’s Pass. Some fun and games with a bit of the traffic, but with the weather being what it was we couldn’t do too much.

We had one incident with a pimped up Range Rover. Finding room from nowhere to overtake me, he slotted in a gap so small between me and Rob that I thought we were going to touch. After I radio’d to Gav to make a move on the traffic in front of him, Gav and Rob duly overtook the cars in front, but when the Rangie decided to go aswell he didn’t see me up alongside him. I’ve never seen so much black smoke come from the back of a new car, but he clearly gave the game away that he was a derv and so I duly re-passed him after a cheeky flash of the lights. He wasn’t impressed. I just smiled back.

After traversing through Buxton’s traffic, we turned off and headed up the A537 – Cat & Fiddle territory. Visibility suddenly dropped to 15 metres or so and the roads were serisouly wet, and at this point Rob’s Mini and my 182 came into their own and showed the advtange of front wheel drive over the rear wheel drive of the Exige.

Before we knew it, we reached the summit and the infamous Public House. The pictures show just how bad it was up there, and just made us think of the hot grippy stuff we revelled in back in June. Refreshments were taken onboard, and after being traumatised by the picture of a cat playing a fiddle we left to continue our journey.

More traffic was met with more rain, and the journey wasn’t exactly the clearest of routes. We continued up through Whaley Bridge and onto Glossop, before Gav pulled over unexpectantly. I got out to check what was happening, only to be told that lightening does indeed strike twice.

Rob was nearly out of fuel! Oh yes. It doesn’t matter if it was at the top of the higest peak in Europe, or in the murky industrial town of Glossop, his fuel tank was once again reading empty. The slow crawl to find a petrol station had indeed got Rob worried, and that he was hoping beyond all hopes that his little Mini would drink as frugally as possible, sipping every morsal as though it had the last drops of petrol on earth.

With just the snake pass and more traffic left to cover, we were left with the vision that indeed ‘motorsport can be dangerous’. Coming round one of the bends on the Snake Pass, we abruptly jammed on the anchors to find an upturned car.

This was the best picture I could get without the policeman giving me the evils. I’ve still no idea how anyone could upturn a bog-standard clio at this point on the road.

And so as a last fling, we bid farewell to one of the original roadtrip cars and look forward to the next motor in Rob’s garage.

Saluting the Cooper…

We’ve noted some good routes for the future, but to be honest because we couldn’t see much due to the weather it was difficult to get a good impression. Perhaps an earlier start time to avoid traffic for the next one.

Oct 13, 2008 | Cars | Leave A Comment »