I awoke for Day 2 of the Hagerty Fall Classic at about 5:15am, roughly two and a half hours before my alarm. The anticipation for today’s route was too much, suddenly I was awake and the next moment I was reviewing each road for the day in my mind. While we’ve done remote routes and destinations in previous events, today’s roads put a whole new meaning into “out there”. Fuel and food was widely spaced, and careful planning had gone into working out a route that would ensure cars, and their person contents, wouldn’t run out of fuel. Despite weeks of going over the timing in my office, here I was lying in bed at 5:30am doing the math all over again

By our 8:45am driver’s meeting, I had nothing but pure anticipation and excitement in my head. Often, when creating a route for Classic Car Adventures, the process begins with a single road, or destination in mind. When we find brilliant road, the puzzle becomes whether or not we can mix that road into a three day event, and do it at just the right moment. Leave the road too late in the day, and your entrants could be too tired to appreciate it. Start the event off with the best road, and you’ve potentially wasted the ‘wow’ moment before there could be any buildup. For us, designing the perfect event is far from simply booking a few hotels and drawing a squiggly line through the map. As the moment of the ‘perfect road’ nears, the anticipation of having it all work out is like a big adrenalin rush. And so, with that rush in my head I opened the drivers meeting…

Together as a group, the route book map was consulted, and the suggested lunch location was highlighted. We worked out the vast areas of “nothing” we would travel, so fuel and snack plans could be roughed in before departure. With a promise of good food in a remote town you might not find on a traditional map, we hit the road. Rarely does a drivers meeting get backed up so perfectly in the first hour of driving. As we made our way North we turned off onto a short winding road to warm the group up. The winding road is fantastic in it’s own right, a short six mile jaunt the twists and turns before dropping you down into the valley through a series of switchbacks. In a curious case of coincidence, the road was littered with tumbleweeds. Nothing says ‘you’re leaving civilization’ better than dodging tumbleweeds on a forgotten highway!

At one point this morning, I was looking out the windshield of my ’58 Beetle, following a pack of Mini’s and a ’58 Alfa Romeo Spider. I was being passed by a Mercedes 280SL working it’s way up the pack, and as I looked in my rear view mirror a Jaguar XK120 had just come into view. You simply can’t spend a Saturday in any better way!

The route today traveled up the Methow Valley, across the Okanogan Valley and into the Kettle Mountains, where we turned North towards the Okanogan highlands. As we traveled into the Kettle mountains the temperature dropped, and a touch of rain fell here are there. Chilly enough that convertible tops went up, wet enough that the wipers were turned on, but mild enough on both accounts that the driving and enjoyment wasn’t dampened.  We arrived for lunch, having passed through the rain, in the small town of Republic. Here the group overwhelmed a local BBQ joint, and in true Classic Car Adventures fashion simply rolled with the punches and helped the staff to see the humour in being so swamped for lunch. One entrant was heard explaining that he would have called ahead, but until this morning had no idea even where he was going!

With lunch over, the time for our chosen road had come. We’d be heading West,  through the highland mountains back into the Okanogan Valley. To find the turn the route book simply described a ghost town, gave a mileage estimate and then marked the lone road sign you hoped your co-driver didn’t miss! Fortunately, everyone seems to have made the turn. Our signature road combined every element of the “perfect adventure” into one road. There were mountain passes, tight twisting sections, open flowing sections, lake side driving with cliffs right next to you…this road had it all. 

I can hear you now, saying to your computer screen, “What road was it?!”, “Where could they have gone?”. I would love to tell you, but now you can appreciate the level of anticipation I had about how much everyone would enjoy it. That burning question which cannot yet be answered. That, my dear friends, was what my morning felt like. 

…and besides, this particular road is just as good in the opposite direction but for a whole different reason. It slowly builds, as you travel West to East. Tempting the driver first with a corner set here, a corner set there. But as it nears the Kettle mountains the driving experience becomes like a symphony racing towards the crescendo. It tightens and twists into a brilliant mountain pass before crashing down alongside a lake in a ribbon of turns to the finish. And that, will one day be a feature road of a future Hagerty Fall Classic.

Today’s images are once again provided by the talented Mr. Andrew Holliday.

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