I keep telling people that nobody’s going to show up at 6:30 in the morning for a drive. I keep being wrong.
The whole thing came together in our Facebook group, Texas Sunrise Drives and Dinesh’s chat group Weekend Driving Club. That’s how all of these start — somebody posts a route, somebody else picks a meeting spot and a time, people comment in, and a week later you’ve got a parking lot full of cars in the dark. No club, no dues, no board meeting. Just a post and a date.
Patrick, Randy and I rolled into the Tom Thumb lot in Sanger first, which mostly meant we got to stand around and watch headlights turn in one after another. By the time the sun was actually up we had fourteen cars — thirteen Porsches and Sunny in his Lotus, holding down the honor of the loyal opposition. A bunch of these folks drove an hour just to get to the starting point. That’s an hour of interstate to earn the good stuff. I don’t take that lightly.
Randy gave the pre-drive briefing before we rolled out. The usual and the necessary: this isn’t affiliated with any club, nobody here is your insurance company, drive your own drive. He also volunteered for sweep, and we volunteered Richie and Angela for the lead, which is how volunteering works in this group. Between the three of them on the radio, the group stayed together for ninety miles without anybody getting orphaned at a stop sign.
The Blue Ostrich Run: 90 miles, and the pace was just right
We rolled out of Sanger a few minutes before seven and were back in Valley View at 8:26. Ninety miles, roughly 3,100 feet of accumulated climbing, and a high point around 1,224 feet up in the Montague County hills — which is genuine elevation by North Texas standards.
The route ran west out of Sanger through Bolivar and toward Forestburg, then swung northwest into the good country around Saint Jo and the Blue Ostrich vineyard. There’s a stretch up near the Red River bottoms where the road stops pretending to be a grid and starts following the land. Dips that compress the suspension right where you want it. Sweepers you can see all the way through. And almost no traffic at that hour — I think we passed more cattle than cars.
The thing I keep coming back to: the posted limits on this route are honest. You don’t have to break anything to enjoy it. The road gives you what you need at the speed the sign already permits, which is rarer than it should be. We came back south through Muenster and Era and dropped into Valley View with everybody grinning.
Breakfast at the Bluebonnet Cafe
A few people peeled off for the usual Saturday obligations. About ten of us landed at the Bluebonnet Cafe and Coffee Bar in Valley View, which handled a sudden influx of loud cars and hungry drivers without blinking. Good coffee, real breakfast, and the part of these mornings I actually value most.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you when you buy the car: the car is the smallest part of it. Most of us around that table have known each other for years now. You can only talk about cars for so long — unless somebody shows up with a new toy, and then you get a solid twenty minutes and a lot of walking around the front bumper. The rest of the time it’s kids and jobs and knees and travel plans and who’s retiring and whose kid just moved out. Somebody’s tire question turns into somebody else’s back surgery turns into three people planning a trip they’ll probably actually take.
That’s the real return on this thing. The cars just gave us a reason to keep showing up until we became friends.
If you’ve never done a group drive, that’s the pitch: the driving is the excuse, the parking lot is the point.
The Long Way to Whitesboro: five cars, 118 miles
After breakfast a few more folks headed home, and five of us pointed east for round two. We left Valley View at 9:46 and I didn’t stop tracking until just after noon.
This one runs east to Mountain Springs, doubles back through the Cross Timbers south of Gainesville, then heads north through Woodbine to Sivells Bend and out along the Red River. The payoff is the Lake Texoma shoreline — Cedar Mills, Rock Creek, Gordonville — where the timber closes in and the water flashes through the trees. Then it drops south into the ranch country above Whitesboro.
We broke up at the intersection of 377 and 82 in Whitesboro. No ceremony, no long goodbye — a couple of waves, a few taillights going different directions at a traffic light, and that was the morning. Everybody had somewhere to be, and everybody had already gotten what they came for.
By that point the temperature was climbing and the traffic had woken up, but it was still a good run. My track shows 118.6 miles total, though about forty of that is my own ride home south through Southmayd, Van Alstyne and Celina, so don’t judge the route by that number.
Why this keeps working
Thirteen Porsches and a Lotus, four hours, two routes, one breakfast, zero drama. Nobody was trying to prove anything. Nobody got left behind. Everybody drove within themselves and still had a great time, which is the whole thesis of this group and the reason I keep setting an alarm for a time that has no business existing on a Saturday.
Next one’s coming — it’ll show up in the Texas Sunrise Drives group like all the rest. Come find us. And if you’ve been telling yourself you’re not a morning person, so was I, right up until the first time I saw fog sitting in a pasture at 7 a.m. with a road running through it.
Life’s too short for boring highways so follow me at Porsche’s ROADS app.