Mark your calendars! Every third Saturday in August, the annual Dream Cruise thunders down Woodward Avenue in Metro Detroit. If you love classic cars or just want to attend a kick-ass event, you’ve got to check this out!
The Dream Cruise is all about vintage iron, from impeccably restored vehicles to unmolested survivors, modified muscle-machines to high-dollar imports, practically every kind of car and truck can be seen running up and down this multi-lane thoroughfare in a monumental display of automotive awesomeness. Just grab a cooler of refreshments (preferable of the non-alcoholic variety, as the local constabulary doesn’t take kindly to public drunkenness) and a bag chair, then plop yourself down along the shoulder of this historic highway and watch the magic roll past.
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The Dream Cruise as we know it today started back in 1995 as a small fundraiser to help support a local soccer field. Since then, it’s blossomed into the largest single-day automotive event in the world, attracting some 1.5 million people and a claimed 40,000 classic cars.
SEE ALSO: Celebrating the Chevy Camaro’s 50th Birthday on Woodward Ave.
But the roots of the cruise reach back to the middle of the last century. During the 1950s and ‘60s it was a hotbed of street racing, when big-block performance ruled the road.
The venue for this automotive spectacle is historic Woodward Avenue, the first paved mile of roadway in the United States. A well-traveled thoroughfare, it runs from downtown Detroit all the way up to Pontiac, an arrow-straight 20-odd miles. It’s an angled slice across the map, cutting through numerous communities including Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge and Royal Oak, to name a few.
To get a small taste of what the Woodward Dream Cruise has to offer, make sure to watch the video posted above. It’ll give you but a glimpse of what this record-setting classic-car event is all about.
