Story: Noellene Gleeson
The end of Turtons Track in Beech Forest
We are outside our home in Ballarat and the sun is shining. Yes … shining!
MX-5s start arriving, 11 in all from Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong and Melbourne. Bronwyn and Geoff present us with a helium balloon with a large “3” on it. A very lovely touch. I loop it on to our style bar while I locked the house, but as Johnny boy moves the car out the balloon goes skyward towards Bendigo! Bye bye balloon … we had it for about seven minutes.
John gives his usual welcome speech and off we go. Tops down, off towards Cressy to meet more MX-5s. This is when we realise RED is the colour of the day. Four reds left Ballarat and we picked up another three at Cressy including Alan and Dawn’s newly acquired red NC. How common!
Now we have 15 cars. After a quick chat we head off through Beeac past the large salt lakes and into Colac for morning tea.
We pull up beside our last pick up who is talking to a local MX-5 owner. With 17 cars all lined up we created quite a bit of interest with people coming up and checking out the cars and taking photos. We say goodbye to the local guy (he will be with us one day, watch this space) and back into the cars for the best of the run still to come.
Ian leads us with David closely following as we head towards Beech Forest. Great roads, twisting and turning through valleys and hills until we reach our favourite part of the run, Turtons Track. This a very narrow road with tall gums and you almost drive under the tree fern fronds. It is beautiful … not that you get to admire it much with the way we like to drive it because you go through one turn and head immediately into the next. This goes for 15km and everyone has a great smile on their face when they emerge at the other end.
It is about lunch time, so we head up to the West Barwon Reservoir for our picnic lunch. We like the picnic lunch because of the freedom it gives us to stop anywhere … and it’s great socially.
The guys also get a chance to check out each others’ cars. John was very happy to show off our new addition, a cold air intake. I might add he didn’t mind showing off what it did to the performance on the run either.
Anyway it’s “head ’em up, move ’em out” and we head to Skenes Creek. The traffic is light so we have a good run to the coast.
On to the GOR … the ocean is really choppy, large waves hitting the rocks and a lot of sea mist. Then we strike two caravans. My God, don’t they use their mirrors?! Sixteen MX-5s plus others following and they drive past all the slow vehicle turn-outs. Unbelievable.
We turn off at Lorne and head towards Winchelsea.
This run has been on the absolute best of roads and it keeps on going. We pull in at Winchelsea and say our goodbyes as each of us will head off in a different direction. Five cars head towards Ballarat, two to the Cape Clear Hotel and three to the Buninyong Hotel for tea and a wind down after a fabulous day with our MX-5 friends and our tremendous little cars.
Zoom Zoom.
