(This is a carbon-copy of my thread on Grassroots Motorsports forum, but figured it might be of interest to people here and/or people here may have good suggestions and advice). Feel free to comment here or on the GRM forum if you're a member there!
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I've gone cross-country twice in a car. Once in 1975 when I was one year old, riding in the back of an Audi 80 from Newport RI to Seattle. Then back the other way in 1979 when I was four, riding shotgun in a 1970 Triumph GT6 with my mom driving (and my dad and little brother in the same Audi 80, towing a sailboat). I ended up owning that GT6 and always wanted to go cross-country in it, but never felt that the car would be that fun (or safe) to do it in, in this day of fast traffic and big SUVs everywhere.
So I sold the GT6 and bought a 1987 Porsche 924S for $1k on craigslist. Well, more accurately I bought two for $1k each. One with a good body and interior but a blown engine, and the other with a good engine and crap everything else. Put them together and now I have an '87-bodied car with the desirable 160hp '88 engine. Over the past year-plus I've been refurbishing it, and making it better (while keeping it mostly stock), and it has turned into my favorite road-trip car. So far I've put up to about 500 miles on it in a day with basically no issues other than a few miinor things. I consider ever-increasing "local" road trips here on the east coast as shakedowns, to find the problems and build trust. My ultimate goal is to do a cross-country-and-back trip to visit places and friends, someday when money and time (and family) allows.
So anyhow, this is a thread I'm starting now and will maybe finish in a few years, in which I'll occasionally talk about the car (otherwise detailed in my e30/924 build thread in that section), talk about plans, solicit ideas, and stuff like that. More importantly, I need it to keep myself motivated to actually DO this someday. I'm by nature both adventurous and cautious at once (I carry way too many tools and spares on road trips already), and do have real-life limitations ($400k+ left on my mortgage, wife, and two kids) that make this all a tall order for me to actually pull off. Plus the thing about how much time I can take, and who or if anyone would come with me (my wife is not that kind of adventurer, plus not sure we could survive each other for that much time together haha).
The "general" goal, since I've been up and down the east coast many, many times, is to start at my house in the Washington DC area, and end up somewhere in the Pacific NW, drive down the west coast via PCH, and then drive back across the country by a different route. I'm notoriously a "goal-driven" road tripper: "most efficient" way from point A to point B and not good at making impromptu stops to see cool things. So I'm going to try to change all that.....take my time, see the sights, and not be in a rush to get anyplace. I've knocked some things off the bucket list (road racing, stage rally - which I continue to do), but this is the one thing that always stays in the back of my mind -especially as I see my friend Chris Nonack and other friends taking epic trips.
The idea of fly-and-drive is certainly more time-efficient, but I love the build as much as the driving and really want to do this in MY car, this car that I bought specifically for long-distance touring. So, bear with me as this thread starts SLLLOOOOOOOWWWLY and maybe someday gets interesting.
