On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 09:44:55AM +1000, [email protected] wrote: > > When I was in the RAF, I regularly hitch-hiked the 180 miles from camp to my > home on the south coast. The best trip ever was in a Jaguar XK140 from the > camp gates to South London - 110 miles - then a Rolls Royce (who cares which > model) driven by the owner, for once, from South London to my front door! > Never did as well as that again. By contrast, on another trip one leg was in > a Humber Snipe from the 1930's.
My best ride as a hitch-hiker was hitching from Cambridge to London on a damp day. I got picked up by a guy driving a Volvo P1800 (best known as the car Roger Moore/Simon Templar drove in the TV series "The Saint").He knew how to drive the car, so navigating roundabouts at speed on slick roads wasn't any problem for him. That was the best ride in the wet I ever got until 2003, when I got a ride around a wet Brands Hatch (a circuit a mile away from the house where I grew up) in a pace car driven by Roberto Moreno when the CART (IndyCars) visited for the London Champ Car Tropy. As we approached the hairpin I felt the car begin to slide. Rather than steering to correct the slide as I would have done he just balanced the car on the throttle to slide the back end out as well, and simply navigated the car round as fast as most folks could have done in the dry, without ever losing control, with only one hand on the wheel, and all the while chatting to me about his impressions of the circuit. I've never been in a Rolls-Royce, but I have driven a Bentley R-Type. This was one of a rotating stable of cars owned by a friend of mine. In exchange for my being willing to occasionally run an errand for him (go and get take-away food, etc.) I got free use of almost any of the cars he had in the driveway (mostly there for teams of door-to-door salesmen he had working for him). The Bentley was one of those, but I also got to drive a Hillman Imp, a Jaguar S-type, and a variety of everyday saloons. Although I rode in them all at one time or another, I didn't get to drive most of the cars he had for himself, which included an Adams Probe (the car driven by Alex in "Clockwork Orange"), an Aston Martin DB4, and (to drag this post back closer to being on-topic) a Jaguar E-type 4.2 coupe. I did eventually get to drive the DB4, but that's another story. -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
