Portugese tarts and a failed coil.

On Monday I went for a drive north to Enzos in the Hunter Valley for coffee with Colin and Craig,an early 911 trio. To avoid the traffic we started early and met up at Jerry's Cafe at Kulnura. Jerry's is a great roadhouse- in a good location with plenty of off road parking and it's very popular particularly with bikers heading north up the Wollombi Road.
The coffee is excellent and Jerry has good food - particularly the Portugese tarts. Not quite as good as Portugese Portugese tarts but a pretty good substitute.

It was once Kulnura Motors but now it's just Jerry's

Jerry and those Portugese tarts

The day did not go as planned. Craig's 911S lost the electrics about 15kms up the road from Kulnura. He had to wait 3 hours for the NRMA flatbed truck to recover him. Luckily where he stopped was a safe piece of road with a hard shoulder but it was not a comfortable wait as it was hot. Luckily I had given Craig a pile of Porsche magazines at Kulnura so he had roadside reading otherwise he would have been pretty bored looking at that scrub and counting the flies.
This is the second time in three weeks that Craig has been stranded out on a lonely stretch of road due to a failure on the car. He's run up quite a towing bill. Yesterday's problem was down to a failed ignition coil.

Craig calling the NRMA - he was lucky that there was a mobile signal albeit a very weak one.Colin looks on thinking "it could have been me".

Colin and I had to leave Craig at the side of the road and head north as planned. We had a great run but it was very hot in the Hunter Valley. It's odd driving up the very quiet and winding Wollombi Road - through national parks and featureless scrub and gumtrees with few signs of habitation for km after km and then to turn right at Broke and after crossing the Singleton military area pop out into verdant vineyards,wine cellar doors,providores,manicured gardens and hipster cafes,wedding reception centres and restaurants. Enzos was full of tourists and hundreds of thousands of pesky flies. Asian tourists were practising the Australian salute -a fly swatting wave of the hand- all around us.
We came back down the same route and were relieved to find that Craig was not still sitting by the roadside.
My car ran beautifully for the 300km round trip despite the heat. As always it took the often rough roads and the fast pace in its stride. The car was in better shape than the driver at the end of the drive. 
We decided that this was the last run in the early cars until the end of summer-it's just getting too hot.
My 2.2 has put quite a few hard and fast kilometres under its wheels this year-it's time for a break and a full service.
Map of our route below.
Photos taken with the Leica Q.