LADIES’ CHOICE
Having to roll-start my car down the driveway wasn’t perhaps the most auspicious start to the recent North Shore Vintage Car Club (VCC) Ladies Day, but with an assortment of classics from a wide range of decades already lined up, I anticipated an interesting introduction to other female owners/drivers.
By the time I’d admired a few of the cars — the 1965 Ford Zodiac, 1959 Nash Metropolitan, the 1940s Mercury, and more — I’d discovered that most ladies had brought a chauffeur. There were fewer rough and tough gals piloting their own course through this blokey classic car world than I’d hoped. It was explained that the ‘ladies’ portion allowed the ladies to choose our destinations, two fabulous privately owned gardens in the rolling hills northwest of Auckland, though apparently a vintage Vauxhall collection also awaited us at garden number two.
The first part of the official route cut through Albany’s urban sprawl, so Catherine, in the 1929 de Soto K, suggested I follow as she picked a very meandering and more open route to destination one. After all, she knew the area, and my canine companion is a non-driver, and illiterate, so no use even at navigating.
What fabulous roads there are up there, quiet and undulating and verdantly green, a fit introduction to the sort of gardens that could convert the most ardent concrete-ophile, accessed by the sort of driveway that simply begs to be fringed by assorted classics.
Having admired both gardens and cars it was time for location two, this time following Richard and Angela and the 1928 Austin Light 16 Clifton Tourer, which took a gravel short cut, to arrive just as the convoy of more recent classics turned in from the opposite direction.
This garden was as spectacular, the classic Vauxhalls — my fave a 1935 Vauxhall DX Stratford Ventura — winking in the sun a perfect counterpoint to the roses, but it was the Vauxhall dragon that most drew the eye, welded from automotive parts and guarding the garage from all comers.
The VCC is open to anyone with an interest in cars older than 30, and there’s nothing quite like admiring such a broad array of classics from amid a convoy of them. See you next time?