When you read this, I will be gone. No, not from this venue1, nor from this mortal coil2, but rather from Southern California3. I’ve packed my trash and moved to Northern Virginia—the DC beltway, to be specific. Apparently, the denizens refer to this area as NoVa or the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia), but as a carpetbagger, I’ll pass on that nomenclature until I use those terms appropriately.
However, I don’t know how to figure that out. In California, you just have to be here through one noticeable earthquake and you’ll be accepted. There’s probably a rite of passage here, too, maybe a secret handshake, but no one talks about it. I get by using “Dude!”, “Righteous!”, and “People on ’ludes should not drive” with reckless abandon. I also wear my slip-on Vans with flames, age-appropriate or not.
Am I going to miss California? Some of it, sure; I’ll miss the sunny days, beach walks, and easy access to high-quality Mexican food. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to deal with the loss of grilled fish tacos, crispy carnitas, and Cadillac margaritas strong enough to be considered disinfectant, but I will survive… probably. Worst case, I’m perfectly capable of making the margaritas myself.
I’ll miss a lot of the car culture, too. I have a feeling that as good as the local Cars & Coffee may be on the East Coast, it is unlikely to draw from the same universe of vehicles. In the last 90 days or so, there were seven original GT-40s, some from each of three generations, at one show, four Paganis and three Koenigseggs at another, and so many McLarens at a third that no one even stopped to look at them; everybody, including me, went directly to the white-over-green 21-window VW bus instead.
Will I miss the traffic? No, not at all. Having a 45-minute drive take an hour and a half is just stupid, as is the fact that you can’t really predict how long your drive will actually be. As far as I can tell, the local chapter of the Anti-Destination League has a secret daily e-mail list wherein they announce where all of the impaired should meet to drive. Because of this dichotomy, we leave early and know every decent coffee roaster near our friends’ houses so that we can duck in and waste some time before we were actually supposed to show up. (It’s rude to show up early, but even worse to get drafted to help when you do. If I wanted to help make dinner, I would have brought a sharp knife, a decent pan or two, and an apron with neither ruffles nor floral print.4)
How bad is it? When I moved to south Orange County in the mid-Nineties, I could make it to downtown San Diego in a little over an hour; now I plan on two. One day, the Friday before a holiday weekend, it took over six hours.
There are a bunch of tracks there, too: Thermal Club, Chuckwalla, Buttonwillow, Willow Springs, Auto Club Speedway, Irwindale, the Porsche Experience Center, plus Laguna Seca, Sonoma, or Spring Mountain if you want to drive a little farther. But every one of them is a proctological nuisance to access in heavy traffic.
In contrast, where I live now, it’s about an hour and a half of easy driving to get to Summit Point.
Even California’s back roads aren’t really back roads anymore; they’ve been taken over by urban sprawl and fulfillment centers. A buddy put together a tour of fun SoCal driving roads last year—basically, he turned a Butler Motorcycle Map into a loop—but most of the fun parts lasted 10 minutes or less, linked by clogged freeways, lines of trucks, uncoordinated traffic lights, and bumper-to-bumper buffoonery.
It’s not that there’s no traffic where I am now; there is, but it’s easy to circumvent. The immediate area is walkable. Our homeowner’s association runs a shuttle bus to the Metro, which gets us either into the fun parts of DC or to Reagan Airport, and the city itself has a shuttle bus that loops to most of the places we actually like to go. Or we go the other direction and the traffic is next to nothing.
So this was a good move, in more ways than one. Our townhouse has a garage, which is weird enough for the area, but it’s also a two-car garage. Weirder still is that it has ten-foot ceilings, which means a lift easily fits. Which means all three cars have indoor parking. Which means that Moby, the Mercedes; TWUBBL, the Dinan 3; and Hopper, the 911 are all semi-officially Forever Cars.
Given the potential garage issue, they almost weren’t. I was considering a Hyundai Ioniq 5N, in part because Hyundai poached Albert Bierman, former chief engineer at BMW M, to run their motorsports program. But while the N is electric, comfortable, stupid quick, and quieter than a nun’s fart, it just isn’t very engaging. Oddly enough, our Hyundai sales guy tacitly agreed. Just to be clear, he didn’t talk us out of the 5N, but his engagement with his own cars–a modded Mustang GT and a wildly modded Audi S5 that isn’t even vaguely street-legal—made our decision clear.
We have new back roads to explore, and fun, fast, familiar cars to do it in. I’ll let you know how my new Virginia license holds up
- At least I don’t think so. Unless of course I cheesed Satch off with one too many grievously obscure references or antiquated vocabulary choices.
- Why, yes, I am a cockalorum of some magnitude. Thank you for noticing.
- Uh-oh: two potential problems and three footnotes in a single sentence. What have I done?!
- Sure, I can spatchcock the turkey, but do you really want me to use your garden shears to do it? And can I borrow them for the drive home? I may need to spatchcock some of those Anti-Destination Leaguers as well.
