Late Summer Road Run - August 15th
Following the success of their previous road runs, Susan and Alistair Thomson once again kindly offered to organise this year’s Late Summer Road Run which was made more difficult for them as poor Alistair went down with pneumonia soon after they had drawn up the provisional route, leaving Susan to do all the final preparations.
Thankfully, Alistair is now well on the slow road to recovery and he was able to do the run, so many thanks and our best wishes to him for a full recovery.
Once all the hard work had been done and the run details had been published, the wheels started to fall off! Circumstances forced a date change which in itself was not a problem, other than their original choice of finish venue had closed down in the interim leading to a search for an alternative. The final icing on the cake was that a few days before the event they became aware that a major event had been booked at the start venue, necessitating a further change!!
Nonetheless, despite these problems and with a recovering Alistair back in circulation, the event all came together on August 15th.
This being holiday season and with a couple of other events taking place on the same day, the run attracted fewer participants than we normally expect and on the day 12 cars assembled at the replacement start venue of Morgan McVeighs on the A96 at Culsalmond. Given that there was no time to organise a re-route, Alistair and Susan lead us all to Fyvie where we joined the original route.
The route then took us through a number of villages such as Auchterless, Forgue, Keith, Mulben, Lossiemouth and Hopeman before arriving at the fabulous lunch venue of Brodie Countryfare near Forres. After lunch, many of the participants took advantage of the ample retail therapy advantages at Brodie!
Unfortunately, Mark and Mandy Holmes suffered a puncture en-route and decided it would be prudent to head home rather than risk the run up to Brodie without a spare, so they didn't manage lunch. This was particularly galling for them as they had previously experienced rough running in their MGB GT and, having finally got it fixed and running well, they were looking forward to a trouble free run.
All in all, a cracking run with a fine sunny day and some brilliant country roads that many of us hadn't driven before. A big thank you to Susan and Alistair for all their hard work under very trying circumstances - hopefully next year’s run will be straightforward!!
Sadly, no pictures from the run or finish - just the start at Morgan McVeighs.
