National Motoring Heritage Day was formed by the Australian Historic Motoring Federation in 2006 to get all car club members drive their vehicles around their own area - city, town, etc - to show the strength of the car movement in Australia.

Sadly, this fine idea has often been converted into static car displays which are mainly attended by those already in the classic car movement - although the display cars do have to drive to the show and back.

This year the AOMC (the peak body for motoring clubs in Victoria) got a bit back to basics with a couple of cavalcades as well as some shows.

Our plans to run our own cavalcade/drive - which we have done for the last two years - got badly off track when the proposed end venue - E30 Racing at Phillip Island - was cancelled so the track can be re-surfaced (again).

Fortunately, in my role as an AOMC committee member, I had assisted a Geelong based club organise a cavalcade taking in the Geelong and Torquay water fronts and cafe strips, passing as many eyeballs as possible.

So we switched our club event to take part in that.

The start point was a well attended monthly coffee and cars style event from which about 40 cars departed for the cavalcade drive to the Great Ocean Road Chocoltaire and Ice Creamery, which not only has ample parking and quite a crowd of people but some very nice food and coffee.

One advantage of this arrangement is that there were many obviously old cars in the group, some of veteran status, which are more liklely to cause heads to turn - which is the objective. And I am glad to report that heads certainly did turn, thumbs up were given, and people came to look.

Our members brought a wide range of heritage vehicles, not all BMW, all appreciated and we all had a very enjoyable day out, just making it to the end before some rain came.

Lawrence Glynn
Treasurer