Bentley brigade makes stop in Bigfork
Ryan Murray | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 11 years, 5 months AGO
<p><strong>A row of classic</strong> Bentley automobiles sits in the sun at Flathead Lake Lodge near Bigfork on Thursday. Saturday morning, the Bentley drivers will head toward Eureka and into British Columbia. </p>
A British invasion of Bigfork this week features more than two dozen Bentley drivers pausing during their tour of the West.
The British luxury cars currently in Bigfork, ranging in model year from 1924 to 2007, have motored across the Western United States, starting in Los Angeles on a roundabout route to Seattle.
The four-week trip has stopped in Bigfork until Saturday morning, when the drivers will fire up their luxury cars and drive through Columbia Falls, Whitefish and Eureka up to Cranbrook, British Columbia.
The tour then will head west through British Columbia and drop down to Seattle on June 20.
Richard Freestone, on the touring group’s “committee of three,” has been around the states in his 1928 4.5-liter Bentley four times and he is already looking ahead to a fifth tour.
“We love coming to the USA,” Freestone said. “The roads are so good and the countryside is so beautiful.”
The group has taken trips from North Virginia to Memphis, Baltimore to New York and Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The next trip will be somewhere along the Gulf Coast.
Bentley was bought by Rolls-Royce in 1931 and was acquired by Volkswagen in 1998.
That means for one of the drivers, it was an especially international affair.
He is an Australian living in Monaco driving a German-owned, British-built vehicle in the United States on the way to Canada.
The cars, the majority of which are worth more than half a million dollars each, do get up to highway speeds, though the drivers avoid them for the most part.
“We take the U.S. highways, there are less lorries [trucks],” Freestone said. “It doesn’t matter what the speed limit is, they all seem to go 80 mph.”
Each car cost 4,000 British pounds (more than $6,000 American) to ship over from England, but the drivers save money on gas while in the states. The price for an imperial gallon of gas in the United Kingdom? More than $11.
The 28 cars (two broke down between Los Angeles and Death Valley) were going to try to make it over Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, but Freestone was disappointed to hear the alpine section of the road still is closed.
Freestone said they would find another route into the park.
After all, they’ve come all this way already.
Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.