This page has some pictures of my X-country trip that I took with my awesome friend Dan Paul in the summer of '96. We went across the country in a 1983 Scirocco that had well over 250K on it. The story of how we ended up going across country in it is quite interesting. If you want to read it, click here. Anyway, we took the back seats out and set off....

X-Country

Here we are, stuck in the mud in Michigan. If you look carefully, you can see Dan's head (with the light blue engineer's cap) sticking out of the passenger's side window. We had been driving down an old railroad bed (which you can see running from left to right behind the car) for about fifty miles (which we later found out was illegal) when we decided to go back to the main road. I, being the brilliant person that I am, decided that driving through this mudpuddle looked like the best way back to the main road (which we could see beyond the mudpuddle). That was no "mudpuddle"..... We had to go and get a local to pull us out for $20... we were trying to live cheaply, sleeping by the side of the road and cooking pasta on a Whisperlite... that $20 hurt. Oh, well, that's life.

This is a little earlier on... back a ways on the railroad bed. Although you can't see us, we are standing on an old railroad bridge (along with the car), looking across to the highway. Yes, the old bridge held us, and the car. It had been recently fixed up so that snowmobiles could go across it.

In the Woods

One day, Dan, Jonah (my brother), Peter Howe and I decided to go camping. So we got there, and were looking around for a camping spot. We finally decided on this one that was near the water and looked pretty cool. The camping spot was a flat spot on the top of a hill that sloped down, tree and boulder-covered, to the water. So we parked the car, jumped out of the car, and ran down to the water, yelling and singing about what a great time we were going to have... we were in a crazy fun mood. Well, then we heard this crashing, and looked back. I said, "What is someone doing driving their car through the woods...." and then realized that it was my car! We saw it fly up in the air (it was at least 2 feet off the ground- ask anyone who was there). Anyway, it rolled down the hill, bouncing off boulders, missing trees, and came to rest in between two trees, perfectly unharmed.

Here, you can see the boulder that it came to rest in front of, as well as the pond just beyond the boulder. There were some up-slanting rocks just in front of the boulder that acted like chocks for the wheels and kept it from going any further.

Those trees were so close to either side of the car that we had trouble pulling it out again without ripping the mirrors off. But the car hadn't even scraped them. In this picture you can see the trail of destruction that the car left behind. We noticed, when examining the tire tracks, that at one point the tires leave the ground entirely and then start again about five feet later and three feet to the left. So the car did leave the ground, like we saw. At first, I was mad at Peter for not parking the car right (he was driving), but now I'm glad he didn't, because there is this great story. The car dumped its muffler at the top of the hill (it was always coming off- it was supposed to be on a 16V but it wasn't), but was otherwise unharmed. We pulled it out with a comealong and my dad's Toyota 4x4, and drove it home in the morning. The bowls that we were going to eat our breakfast out of were smashed, though... oh, well.