Spiel

BILL BAUER PHOTO BY ADAM CRABTREE I'd like to hear from you at president@ pnwr.org or call me at 206.972.5639. About anything! In Praise of Skinny Roads A skinny road is that road your friend tells you, in near-reverent tones, "We drove this amazing route with 500 turns and saw two other cars all morning". Skinny roads are those little lines on the road map, the fainter and more "squiggle- ful" the better, the ones that you hope are paved, yet are beckoned to discover. Skinny roads challenge your GPS, and take you to places where cell phones don't phone, data, or text. Skinny roads make you feel like you are really DRIVING rather than plotting how to gain three cars lengths over the next 5 miles in afternoon traffic. Skinny roads are for adventure, for the 'see what we can see', for a journey not the destination. Skinny roads are forever enticing whether you have driven them many times or never. I love skinny roads. I hunt for them. I live on one, albeit the urban variety. I think of it as my extended driveway. There is an alternative route to home all straight and festered with curbing and divided lanes and crosswalks and stoplights. It is much traveled, but not by me. My skinny road is 6 April 2012 52 turns in 3.4 miles, not a stop sign along on the way, and I learn to be a better driver every journey. Fun at 25mph, feisty at just a touch more. All driving all the time, no auto piloting. I grew up alongside of one, in the rural east where there might have been one German-made car in the whole county. No matter. Route 957 was a skinny road and still is, a narrow black stripe across rolling hills and green farmland, paved in a land where dirt roads outnum- ber paved. I learned much on those unpaved, unlined paths sliding in gravel, mud, snow and the seasonal mixes of all. I did not fully disclose the nature of this education to the parents, truth be told, but the lure of skinny roads was forever set. Now I am in the land of 1600 and more of you with Porsches, the perfect car for the skinny road. I know many of you with inspiring, epic skinny road stories. I've heard them. I've been on a few with you. I yearn for more of them. Don't you? Our tourmeisters, Eric and Miller, have successfully hunted the skinny roads. In refined company, we call them "tours", and the season has just started. Come join us, come revel the art of the skinny road, make new comrades, be merry, create your own stories. On April 15 we present the "More Smiles to the Miles" tour, and should you at all wonder why we would choose such a name, then you really must come and enjoy skinny roading the PNWR way. I was inspired to this story by Adam Crabtree's post on our Facebook page. His car is pictured here (page 15), a beautiful white 993 wearing the joys of a found skinny road created whilst mapping a tour for us. We should all be so lucky. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference Robert Frost – excerpt from "A Road Not Taken" The skinny roads beckon us. Are you listening? See you on the road, at the track, in a club meeting, or at an event soon! Bill

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