As I’m wont to do, I was putting my trip notes from our family vacation last summer to the Grand Canyon into an Excel spreadsheet. I have many reasons for logging my trip notes, but the primary one is generally to procrastinate from doing something, like filing my taxes.

I recently survived a horrific car crash. I feel fortunate to have escaped with only bumps and bruises, but my 2019 Golf R was totaled.

The story starts off in Italy back in May 1999. My friend Luca invited me to drive from Regensburg, Germany down to Genoa, Italy with him to visit some of his relatives there. I said sure, as long as we could swing by Maranello and visit the Ferrari factory (another mediocre story for another time). So armed with my little point and shoot camera, I started snapping pictures out the car window at the landscape.
Fast forward twenty-one years later to May 2020 and I’m locked down in a pandemic. I don’t bake bread or plant gardens, so I’m in my basement scanning film negatives instead. That’s when I re-discovered my pictures from Italy on that trip.

My 1989 Porsche 944 Turbo was immobilized for over a year after I decided to work on one of the most critical components of a car—the radio. Without a radio, a car is not driveable.
This could have been a good pandemic project, but I actually started back in the summer of 2018 and didn’t finish until the end of summer 2019—over a year later. This was supposed to be an easy winter project, but on an old Porsche, no project is ever easy or straightforward.

I’ve lost all track of time. My children have turned feral after hours of unsupervised screen time. I’ve been banished to the basement while working from home. And we’ve been so desperate for streaming content we’ve even subscribed to Apple TV+.1 But none of that really bothers me.
What I really miss is driving.

I attended the 2019 Detroit auto show (NAIAS) last January, but unlike other years, it was for work. I spent most of my time in the basement pretending to be interested in autonomous vehicle stuff. It’s a section called AutoMobili-D, and you may have seen it if you got lost looking for the bathrooms.2