MBCNSW July 2024 night drive – Wisemans Ferry

Ever since we started the night drives in 2020, I’ve wanted to do a route going north from Wisemans Ferry.   The issue was the poor road surface along Wisemans Ferry Road as it goes parallel with the Lower Hawkesbury.   Some of the potholes were big enough to swallow up a W201. Given the lack of lighting it wasn’t really a suitable place for a night drive.

At some point, the most egregious of them have been filled in.  Therefore, it was finally possible to put it on the schedule.   In order to make the length of the drive somewhat manageable, we started at Hawkins lookout.   This isn’t the most ideal starting spot, as there is no lighting, but starting in Glenorie would have added too much time to the route.   Hawkins lookout was the destination point of the second ever night drive, where we managed to disturb an amorous couple in a Ute.  Luckily, this time the place was empty.

From Hawkins lookout, we crossed the Ferry and kept going along Wisemans Ferry Road.   This road winds along the bank of the lower Hawkesbury River.    At night the road was practically deserted, which made it an easy cruise.   There are still some areas of perpetual road works, but nothing that is not obvious in the dark.    The winding road is good to cruise along, especially with no traffic.    At Central Mangrove, we turned off Wisemans Ferry road to head to Peats Ridge Road, which has some great fast sweeping bends, and again, no traffic at night.   We lost a couple of people in the dark, and since there is no mobile phone reception it wasn’t easy to find the rest of the group, but they eventually did.

After Peats ridge road, there is the very windy section of the Old Pacific Highway as it goes down through Mount White towards Mooney Mooney.  This area is busy and has a very low speed limit which is aggressively enforced.    We finished up at a long demolished service station just north of the bridge.   This is probably one of my top 5 routes we’ve done on the night drives.  I’m keen to schedule it again in a year or two.

The weather was excellent and we had a pretty decent turn out.    Four W124s – a 230E, two 300Es and a 320CE cabriolet, two W126s – a 380SEC and my 560SEC and a W116, my old 280SE which is continuing the tradition of coming on night drives.    It was a pretty good number for a drive like this.  While it was a late night, I think everyone enjoyed themselves.