If This Is Tuesday, I Must Be In Texas

It seemed like a good idea at the time: I would retrieve Nancy Drew from New Jersey and drive across this magnificent country once again, driving from Shell station to Shell station, trying to accumulate enough Shell receipts on my way to Monterey that my odds would be terrific when they were all entered in the drawing to win a Shell gift card that might actually pay for much of the gasoline I’d burn on the way.

Of course, I am probably ineligible.

The name of the roadster puzzles people, or at least it puzzles the people who do not quite understand the way my mind works. (These same people still don’t understand how the car came to be in New Jersey in the first place, even though I carefully explain how I picked it up in Atlanta and drove it to Oktoberfest… by way of Portland, Oregon. And then Indianapolis. And then Greenville, South Carolina. But it did finally arrive in New Jersey, even though somebody else drove it there from the BMW CCA Foundation headquarters.)

It’s simple: The car is blue. It’s a roadster. And Nancy Drew drove a blue roadster, did she not?

Well, I thought she did, anyway, although in my never-ending search for Truth I have been unable to pin down exactly what color the spunky, plucky—would that make her plunky?—young detective employed. Back before the days of the Internet, I would have told you she drove a powder-blue roadster, and I doubt that anyone would call my bluff, because who can remember all the childhood trivia that comes from reading Nancy Drew, who lived with her father, Fenton Hardy, and—no, wait: That was another series, about these two brothers, Nick and Ned—no, no no! Ned was Nancy Drew’s useless boyfriend (unless that was Sluggo).

Actually, I toyed with calling the car Ned, but he was such a terminal wimp.

And this car is the antithesis of wimposity, what with its S62 M5 V8 engine and (nearly) 400 horsepower. (Nearly in this case means 397, alas. I have wondered for years why BMW couldn’t squeeze three more lousy horses out of that V8, when it seemed to yield any number when Steve Dinan got his paws on it.) It was my dream car in 2000, and it remains my dream car today, so much that I do not care that I now have an automotive debt equivalent to a decent college education. I am embarrassed by my luck.

I am driving a BMW Z8.

Yeah, I know. Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself; maybe it was something I did in a previous life, like finding a cure for diphtheria. Whatever it was, here I am in this one, doing what I love, which is driving to Oktoberfest in my dream car. And since it is about 3,000 miles from New Jersey to San Diego, plus half the state of California between there and Monterey, you’d think I might win something, like the Long-Distance Award—but nooo. We measure from your home, not your starting point.

At least I am eligible for that award. The Shell contest, not so much; people who are Grand High Poo-bahs in the BMW CCA are not eligible to win our contests, nor are those who are paid for their services, which I am. (“Hmm,” I hear you muttering darkly. “He drives a Z8?! We must be paying him too much!” But it’s like Mondo Condo, the place where we live on the shores of the freeway: Sign here and pay for the rest of your life. It’s easier if you set a higher priority on cars than children.) In fact, even if I were to save all my Shell receipts, and stop for gas every hundred miles, and loaded the odds and won the damn thing, I know that BMW CCA president Steve Johnson would just make me give it back and draw again. That’s why I stopped putting my Oktoberfest raffle tickets in the boxes—that and I usually forget about the raffle tickets until the entries are closed anyway.

But a road trip is its own reward, especially in a roadster. I confess that I am still sort of reticent about Nancy Drew; I can’t just mutter, “Yeah, I have this Z8,” without feeling like some kind of braggart—“Nyah, nyah, I have a Z8 and you don’t!”—as if I am flaunting my nonexistent wealth and preening in my status. I try to tell myself it’s just a car—but I confess that I catch my breath a little every time I look at it.

Somebody once said that a measure of a car’s design is looking back—that is, as you leave it in the garage, do you turn and look back at it before you turn off the lights? The 3.0CS coupe is certainly a look-back car, and most other BMW models certainly affect their owners in that small, delicious way. But the Z8 hit me hard the first time I ever saw one; it must have been at the 1999 Frankfurt Auto Show, and it was on a turntable, and I stood there for about fifteen mnutes, watching it change character as it revolved—now echoing the Jaguar E-type, now an homage to the BMW 507, now offering a certain Cobra-esque menace. Oh, man, what I’d give for a car like that! I thought; it was much the way I once felt about Ingrid Bergman (and later Isabella Rossellini; thank God for genetics): swooning at such beauty, and absolutely positively certain that I would be among the millions who could only admire it from a distance.

And now here I am, as I say, driving hell-bent for leather, luxuriating in leather, black leather against the Topaz blue that may be the best blue that BMW has ever sprayed. (Okay, never mind the “may be”: It is, it is!) I am wearing driving gloves to protect the leather steering wheel, and if I seem a little foppish and affected at the wheel of a car so obviously above my station, what sort of poseur wears driving gloves for a leather-covered wheel? I am still so astounded at my luck in life that I am insecure in my good fortune; when I suggested to various friends that they might wish to join me for one or more legs of this adventure, I couldn’t bring myself to tell them what they’d be driving.

I just said we’d cross the country in an M5 roadster.

So here I am in Texas, unless you’re reading this later in the day. Saturday and Sunday brought me to Memphis, where Mark Jon Calabrese kindly stored the hard top for a year—thanks, amigo! I owe you, as usual!—and last night we wound up in Abilene (not the birthplace of Dwight D. Eisenhower in Kansas, but a couple of states to the south). Today it’s on to Arizona, and we’ll finally get home on Wednesday.

And when I say we, I mean just me and Nancy Drew. That’s right, I’m driving solo: I couldn’t find a single friend to take me up on my offer of a cross-country ride. I think they may be remembering the ride home from Oktoberfest 2014, when Steve Johnson and I came across the desert at about 115 degrees.

Hey, I promised that they could have all the Shell receipts! Not only that, but I have mellowed. I promised that we’d put the top up if it rains.—Satch Carlson