OT - My first old car tour

[DLodge]

I can't remember whether I posted this on the old forum, but since this is the new forum - here it is (again).

Anja and I married in December 1972 and moved from an apartment in Amsterdam to a townhouse in Nieuw-Vennep in 1974. We acquired a 1936 Austin Ten Sherborne not long after that. Very much by chance, a few months later we met another Austin Ten owner who lived near Utrecht, Jody Kaldenberg. He was a member of the ATDC, the Austin Ten Drivers Club, in England, which we joined. The ATDC was planning a Continental Tour in the summer of 1975. They would drive to Hull, take the ferry to Zeebrugge, and spend two weeks on a (tent) camping tour through Belgium. Not coincidentally, every planned campground was within a mile of a Trappist brewery.

Several of the Dutch ATDC members decided to drive to Zeebrugge, meet the English folks and join them on the tour. We even made a welcome banner (black paint on an old sheet) for their arrival. In the picture, I am at the left, holding one side of the banner, and Anja is sitting on the fender of our Austin, a blue sedan with license PD-34-03. Since, like Model T's a decade earlier, the Austin was intended to be fairly basic transportation, Austin owners also are pretty down-to-earth people without much in the way of pretensions. With brewery visits, communal barbecues and pancake suppers, sightseeing, etc., we had a great time. (We were also now hooked on touring.)

In those pre-digital days, super-8 movies and photos were the only record we had of the time we spent there. Several years ago, one of the participants, Sylvia Snipp, added a soundtrack and put together a Youtube video. I look at it now and marvel that we were ever that young!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlBDKZvHUrs

[Steve Jelf]

The pants tell you when it was.

[DLodge]

The pants tell you when it was.

Yup. Sure 'nuff.