2015’s Youngest Challenger?

We really enjoyed the motoring challenge this year, after getting started last year and then never really continuing due to life and all that happens with that.  Our goal was to go for our usual fun drives, plan a route, and hopefully get a few points each time.  This meant sticking to back roads as much as possible and looking for small towns off the beaten path…because who really wants to sit in traffic anyway or drone down highways forever?  With the exception of Driving into Philadelphia to gather some photos that required a “real city” we pretty well stuck to our plan.

Early on we decided that we would do a bunch of shorter trips that stayed mostly in our local area.  We didn’t have the time to commit to any major trips this year, and my wife was pregnant.  We planned to have her stand next to the sing for the town of “Intercourse, Pa” with her baby bump, but ultimately that never happened.  The Jag was out of commission for most of the year (of course, the car with comfortable seats and AC) and bouncing down the road on hot summer days in the Mini or Herald for long amounts of time was not my wife’s idea of a great time while pregnant…I wonder why?  Sometimes this meant I was going solo, or having my dad come along, regardless the drives were still great and no mechanical issues the whole time!

I don’t know how competitive we’ll be but we had fun, found lots of great new back roads, and met plenty of people with questions about the cars or their own stories to share about British cars while we took photos or were stopped at traffic lights.  We did discover that in Amish country a classic mini cooper is as popular as a horse drawn buggy, getting just as many second looks from parents in SUVs and Soccer mom vans while pointing and telling their kids to look at the funny car…even some of the Amish people in the buggies were doing this!!  We also learned that an old mini is still one of the best cars to drive in a true city.  Finding spots to wedge the mini in for pictures was never a problem, and even better, no one seemed to care where you stopped or parked!  Three guards at independence hall just looked and smiled as I stopped right in the middle of the street for the photo since there was nowhere to pull over nearby.  This ended up taking longer than expected because tourists started taking pictures of the car too!  I feel like with a mini you could pretty much do anything and people would just laugh, smile or wave, say “look at that goofy car”, and then keep going about their business…at least for us this always seemed to be the case!

Thanks, and we enjoy looking at everyone’s pictures.  If we compete next year I guess we’ll have a tiny third passenger along for the ride…good thing our cars are four seaters!

By Mike Hoinowski