Easter Oppomeet 2019, France. A report.

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Illustration for article titled Easter Oppomeet 2019, France. A report.

After spamming you with reminders for months, it finally started April 15th; the week-long Oppomeet in France. 16 people, 15 cars and countless liters of ~~alcohol~~ fuel. Here’s a report.

My slighly icy (and 346k km) Peugeot 406 coupe, which I swapped for my 205 CTi convertible later that day, in the Netherlands.

I left Southern Germany (Munich, where I live) on Friday the 12th, to drive to my parents in my native the Netherlands. To finally get my convertible out of winter storage. A convertible with no interior, as the restored interior was still at the 205 interior specialist in Belgium.

Sunday

Leaving early at 7:30 am there was still some ice on the windows of the coupe I was going to swap for my convertible later that day. Was this a sign for the upcoming week?

After getting the convertible out of storage I drove to Belgium, installed the restored interior and met up with a few others in Belgium and later in Luxembourg. We formed a convoy towards France.

Our first Airbnb was located in a village named Ventron, in the south of the Elsace region in North-Eastern France.

We rented two large Airbnb houses, one in each of the 2 hubs, Sunday to Wednesday in the first and Wednesday to Friday in the second hub. Why not over the weekend? Because 14 out of 15 cars didn’t come from France, and the one that did came from the south. So the weekends were used for travel. Most people had to drive a day (or more) to even get to France.

Kilometers driven so far (by me): 1600. In legacy units that’s 1000 miles.

Airbnb #1. It consisted of 7 appartments, most with multiple bedrooms per appartment.

The advantage of these larger houses is that they come with a common room (with kitchen). So the first thing we did when we arrived on Sunday in France was ordering typical French food: Pizza.

Monday

Monday started with frozen cars, again.

After breakfast and after letting the sun defrost our cars we started driving. I was instantly pleased with choosing to install heating elements in my seats while they were being restored. We starting with 2 hours of curvy roads towards the very impressive Cité de l’Automobile museum in Mulhouse.

Shortly after we left we received a message from 4muddyfeet. His brand new rental BMW 540i Touring had went into limp mode and he had to swap it with a new rental. In Germany, as he rented the car in Germany. Not even that much later we received this picture.

French customs agents are, apparently, a friendly bunch.

He was stopped by French customs agents close to the border. Apparently he looked like a drug runner. As they couldn’t find his stash, he was free to continue his journey and trade his BMW 540i touring for an Audi A6 Avant. TDI. Especially this latter part made him incredibly... happy.

In the mean time we were at the Cité de l’Automobile. This museum was rather impressive and most certainly something you have to visit when you’re in the region. It’s a Bugatti museum, of which they have a whole hall full of. Additionally to the Bugattis they have many more interesting vintage cars from other brands as well. Starting from 19th century cars to cars from the 1980s.

After the museum we had 4.5 hours of curvy roads ahead of us. Roads that mostly looked like this. The roads were in the middle of nowhere and were mostly deserted, so we could drive as fast as we wanted.

But First: Lunch. We went to a supermarket to get some supplies and food foor lunch. But what would we use as a table? The answer is always the same: ~~Miata~~ MX-5.

Tuesday

Tuesday, Oppo rally day! For this day we had 2 planned 2 different rallies. During day time a rally losely based on Dusty Venture’s Oppo rallies in the US, and at night a short regularity rally.

Regularity rally

Source map on the left, herring bone conversion on the right

Being part of the organization of both rallies I started the day with doing a trial run of the regularity rally. So we could check the route and set a reference time (which we would keep silent) and an average speed. To increase the difficulty we required both a driver and a navigator, and handed out a map based on the image on the left. The entire route would take about 30-45 minutes and we would time the start and finish time.

However, things were not to be.

‘No access due to snow’. But how bad could it be? We had the top off the convertibles and hadn’t seen a spec of snow. Was this a case of a fence that was forgotten a month earlier? And that sign, isn’t that a one way road sign? We decided to continue on.

Snow! A patch of about 20 meters of snow. Not overly deep, but not flat either. The snow had become hard and the 4x4 Fiat Pandas from the forestry service had created deep tracks. This would scrape the belly of many of our cars.

As we couldn’t create a backup route in time or circumvent the snowy patch, we decided the cancel the regularity rally that night and focus on participating in the main rally. Everyone else had already started that rally already.

Regular rally

The rally consisted of 18 locations (way too many to actually visit) and a number of side missions. The locations were picked in such a way that the participants were ‘forced’ to included some culture into the trip and to actually exit their cars. It consisted of picturesque locations, a hike up a few hills to the ruins of multiple castles, historic city centers and a local distillery (plus shop!). Here are the sheets everyone received:

Judging by the feedback we became the rally was a huge success, and will be featured in a next trip as well. Any tips to further improve this are welcome, and are not as easily forgotten when written down ;)