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Old Hare & Hounds
Rednal
Car Decals Made By
Baracas
Legendary Q Gate
Longbridge
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10:50am Leaving Stafford and now
on the motorway on route to the Hare & Hounds hoping the traffic is
light so we arrive as close to the meet time as possible. We made
extremely good time and arrived at 11:25 to see that the car park was
filling up with MG's, obviously everyone is excited about the day
ahead. After a quick shake of hands and welcoming along our newest
member to our small but ever increasing club. Kelv with his delightful
75th Anniversary which looked stunning was personally invited along as
my hopes of getting the full line up of all the anniversary
models was in
jeopardy.
11:45am with all the greetings out of the way it was time first of
all to lend a hand and some matchsticks to Steve aka Baracas to keep
him awake, he had spent many hours in doing the graphic decals for
the cars which went right through the night and into the morning prior
to him leaving for the
trip down to Longbridge. Steve added the graphics to the cars starting
with the largest one on the back of Simon's car the red ZR, and then
on to the rest that were having them on. Whilst this was taking place
I noticed many people looking over Steve C's LE500 which is only a
couple of weeks old and the first LE that I have seen in blue. I would like to say a huge
thanks to Steve aka Baracas for supplying the materials and his time
for the graphics.
12:25pm the rest of us still in the car park moved swiftly into
the the Hare & Hounds for a quick bite to eat which at £3.50 (with
voucher) a head was a bargain. The pub was very pleasant inside, a
quick briefing about what would happen when we arrived at Longbridge
and about the afternoon.
12:55am it is amazing how time flies when you have to be
somewhere, a rapid exit from the car park for the few minutes it would
take to get to Q gate the initial home of all of our cars. For me one
of the notable things of the day was leading the cars up the hill
towards the entrance to MG Motor UK Ltd. Our host and tour guide Ian
Pogson was standing at the roadside awaiting our arrival, suited and
booted and the smile developing on his face with every car that came
into view. On turning into Q gate Ian had parked the 85th Anniversary
at the gate so was in direct view of his visitors which was a very
nice touch.
1pm
we are now inside the gate and all parked up with smiles and
inquisitive looks about what we were now going to be doing, Ian Pogson
was already eyeing up the 'Tour Of Longbridge' decals on the cars and
would be subject of lots of conversations with employee's of MG
throughout the afternoon. I had sent a list of names through a couple
of days before hand, so we skipped the obligatory signing in at
security. The last time I went through the gates was in July 2008 and
today there were many more cars in the staff car park. |
