The Experience

IT IS A TRUISM THAT THE WORST IDEAS OFTEN MAKE THE BEST STORIES.

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WHY OWN A VEHICLE unless it transports you to scenery, wildlife, and a carjacking or two? The experiences we've had over seven decades appear, quite often, to have been risky, at odds with common sense, and deleterious to the car or the driver. Nevertheless, we do it in the interest of returning to the office with a great expense report and an even greater story.

Nothing put us off the map like our tour of Baja California. It was a comparison test, but the adventure—part Mexican telenovela, part police procedural—is what’s remembered, not the finishing order. And to celebrate hydraulic diarrhea, we hydrolocked a Datsun Maxima ina flash flood.

Thanks to a cartographer named Poppet Seymour, we drove a Land Rover Defender 90 and hiked in Utah to what was deemed the most remote site in the Lower 48. We nervously occupied an up-armored Humvee on patrols with gunners in Kosovo. One winter, we bounced five minivans up the Haul Road to Deadhorse, Alaska, ruining tires and windshields on nearly all. More recently, contributor Jonathon Ramsey drove a Dacia Jogger to Poland's border with Ukraine to deliver donations for people from the war-torn country.