[In this part of my West Virginia road trip five years in the making with my best friend, both of our fathers, and two RX-8s we complete our drive together.]

After lunch I’m compelled to revisit the crash site, dragging the others along. I take the car through the curve, keeping the speed under 40 to avoid any chance of a repeat. What would be more embarrassing than wrecking an already wrecked car? Doing so in the same exact place. At 38 the curve is easily navigated, leading me to wonder how fast my father entered it. In his defense, it’s now much warmer so the tires have more grip.

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[In this part of my West Virginia road trip five years in the making with my best friend, both of our fathers, and two RX-8s we return from Summersville, WV, to Mill Creek, where I had, um, left my computer behind in a roadside restaurant.]

At breakfast I plan the day. Or at least attempt to. The judge doesn’t want to spend all day in the car. He wants to do some hiking. I know a good hike to a series of waterfalls along the route. I’ve also always had a thing for trains and there’s a state park not far off our route that operates narrow gauge logging locomotives. They have a Heisler and a Climax, but mostly run Shays. All three types of steam locomotives have unconventional running gear that I’d love to observe in operation. I call Cass Scenic Railroad State Park and find that trains leave at 9:30, noon, and 2:30. The first is too early, the last possibly too late. So we’ll aim for noon.

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So, where were we?

I’d planned a road trip through West Virginia with my best friend, both of our fathers, and two Mazda RX-8s. A little over an hour in, on the way to meet the others, my father had sideswiped a tree, totaling his car. After exploring various options, I’d decided that we could and should continue on in the wrecked car. Around 2 PM Trey and his father, the judge, arrived at the revised rendezvous point in their car. The “real trip” could finally begin.

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Letting go is hard. You can delete all traces of a former love from your life, cut contact, stop looking at old pictures, resolve to hit the gym and move on to something better, but the memories will always linger. You realize that what existed was good, but what the future holds is better… but the moments where you reflect that maybe the bliss ended too prematurely still manage to haunt you, no matter how much you occupy yourself with new thrills and diversions.

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As Chief Justice of the 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court, I receive many gifts from racers wishing to establish a foundation of mutual respect and understanding during the period in which I inspect the cars for possible cheating. The traditional judicial bribe tends to be a jug of top-shelf booze, but my drinking hasn’t kept pace with the intake of bottles of Stranahan’s bourbon and Zaya rum, and so I’ve been encouraging teams to bring weird diecast toy cars to lubricate the gears of justice. After the last round of LeMons Supreme Court diecast toy car bribes, I thought it would be hard to top the Leyland P76 and Moskvich 402, but the racers at the ’11 Southern Discomfort and the ’11 Gator-O-Rama have done so with the current crop of diecasts. Read More >

On the road, behind the wheel, there is no such thing as an accident. There is only a swelling potential of mistakes, building towards an event that happens or does not. You are drunk but the road is empty and you know the way; not enough potential. You are tired, the phone is ringing, and your left front tire is underinflated; now we’re talking. Then you swerve to avoid a pothole and the oscillation chain begins. Potential fulfilled. You are about to have an “accident”.

I say this because I do not remember the “accident” that put me on my back for nearly a month in a disinfectant-stinking hospital room, my eyes taped from the airbag burn, my arms broken, pumped-up on a cocktail of things I cannot even pronounce. They say my Town Car hit the edge of a line of Jersey barriers and flipped forward, landing on the top edge in a ballet of megaton kinetic energy that shattered the windshield and creased the roof down into the bench seats. Single car. I don’t remember. But I remember what happened afterwards.
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Though an objectively awesome car by any (non-environmental) metric (review forthcoming, I promise) some Corvette ZR1 owners are plagued with a strange brake vibration. Which, thanks to the Corvette Forum, is available for all and sundry to see. But let’s dig a little deeper: bearing in mind the customer involved is a personal friend, and his paraphrased comments are as follows.

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For five years I’d been waiting for this day to arrive. My best friend, both of our fathers, a pair of RX-8s, and the mountain roads of West Virginia. They’d been driving the cars on the flat, straight roads of Virginia Beach (where I grew up and the rest of them still live). I had been wanting them to experience how these cars were meant to be driven. Next spring my father’s RX-8 would become mine, so it was probably now or never. We opted for now.

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In this third installment covering my long-sought West Virginia road trip (part one, part two) we meet some of the local talent.

After six hours on the road I cross the Ohio River into West Virginia. New Martinsville is large enough to be ugly. And full of cars. Leaving town on WV 7/20, I’m stuck behind a half-dozen of them. Hopefully most will continue on 7 instead of 20—a glance at the nav shows the split ahead. After a few miles a passing zone finally opens up, and I take it, giving the Infiniti G37 coupe’s 330-horsepower V6 free reign, grabbing third at the redline…only to see the right turn for WV 20 flash by mid-pass. D’oh! Hit the brakes, turn around, this time successfully turn onto 20, and pass some of the same cars for a second time. A fair amount of embarrassment notwithstanding, with so much power on tap passing is effortless fun—as long as there’s a zone to do it in.

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The West Virginia road trip was five years in the making, five days in the doing. The blurred photo captures the spirit—often the most memorable things are those that aren’t entirely planned. In the end, everyone wanted to do it all again next year—with one notable exception. We’ll get to that.

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