QOTD: Destination Joie de Vivre?

One night over the Memorial Day weekend, boredom forced me in search of something mindless and light. Netflix beckoned, and there, unfortunately, I came across a foreign tale of two friends rekindling the old days — and a nearly forgotten lust for life — via a road trip in an old French car. It starred Jean Reno of Ronin fame, so, what the hell.

Sadly, anyone’s mechanic’s brother can sell a script to Netflix these days, and the resulting flick was awash in clichés, overused tropes, and painfully obvious sociopolitical commentary. Still, it did prompt a moment’s reflection.

When was the last time you felt truly alive behind the wheel?

Listen, most of us are at least half dead inside. Life takes a toll. Sure, some of us have rich fathers, dizzyingly lucrative careers, exciting gigs, or well-connected friends that keep the supply of unique life experiences pumping like a fire hydrant. If you’ve ever had to race a McLaren across Dubai in a borrowed Murcielago to reach a shadowy Belgian diamond merchant in time to secure a profitable deal and prevent a kidnapping, good for you.

For most others, the thrills are fewer and far between.

Sometimes it’s the car itself that takes you from humdrum existence to changed man in 4 seconds flat. You’ve secured time behind the wheel in a sought-after supercar on a closed course, said a prayer, and opened it up. Maybe the car itself was normal but the situation saw you push it to 10/10ths. Perhaps the simplicity and purity of the driving experience itself — a borrowed Caterham 7 and a day off, for example — re-connected you both to the road and to life itself.

It could be that the vehicle itself played only a minor role in the experience, and that the setting — the location, the landscapes, the remoteness, the newness of it all — factored more heavily into your emotional experience. A passenger could play into this, too. You proposed to your longtime sweetheart while on a road trip to her parent’s cabin, only to be rejected… but her bombshell sister, seated next to her, said “yes”. (Spare no details.)

We’ll leave it to you to comb those memory banks, searching, perhaps in vain, for a moment where you can still remember the way the air smelled and tasted as you gripped the wheel, your senses fully awake. When was it, what were the circumstances, and what vehicle was it in?

[Image: © 2019 Chris Tonn/TTAC]