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Part 3: Great Drives, Porsche Travel Club

10/20/2011 by Sarah Elbert

Guest blogger Nick Kurczewski's adventure continues. Being directionally challenged isn't so bad when you're in a Porsche Boxter S.

By Nick Kurczewski

Getting there is supposed to be half the fun.

With the Porsche Travel Club, it’s fair to estimate that percentage climbs closer to 100 percent. Past travel club adventures have included ice driving in Finland and cresting towering sand dunes in Dubai.

For the first time in approximately 15 years of globetrotting, the Porsche Travel Club has come stateside. I’m lucky enough to be piloting a Porsche Boxster S, a sleek mid-engine roadster, to understand all that goes into this 5-star driving experience.

As I quickly discover, the most essential elements include fantastic roads, along with a fun-loving attitude when things don’t go exactly to plan. Having got stuck in heavy traffic on the notoriously jammed Interstate 405—of “Carmageddon” fame—most of the group quickly got lost.

Seeing as how I can be, shall we say, directionally challenged, I left finding the correct route in the hands of the experts. Porsche’s team of drivers (some of whom are instructors at the Porsche Sport Driving School in Birmingham, Alabama) soon extricated us from our series of wrong turns.

It was only a speed bump during a memorable day of driving. Following the Pacific Coast Highway north, each turn and dip in the road led to another stunning vista. You’d need an artist’s palate to accurately describe every shade of deep blue, vibrant green, and sun-bleached tans and earthen browns of the landscape.

The precise steering of the Porsche Boxster felt like it had been custom-built for these conditions. With the growling exhaust note of the flat-6 cylinder engine behind me and the crash of ocean waves to my left, the Boxster followed in the wake of the cars ahead.

Photos by Nick Kurczewski


Related:
Part 1: Great Drives, Porsche Travel Club
Part 2: Great Drives, Porsche Travel Club
Part 4: Great Drives, Porsche Travel Club

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About Sarah Elbert

Sarah Elbert

As executive editor of Delta Sky, Sarah Elbert lassos the best writers she can find to cover the world—as well as contributing some prose of her own. Before coming to Sky, Sarah was editorial director of magazines including Northwest WorldTraveler and Carlson Wagonlit Travel's Postcards. She has been a newspaper editor, a freelance writer and an Associated Press reporter, riding with the White House travel pool (back in the Clinton days) and covering everything from natural disasters to a cat kidney transplant. Sarah has written for The New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Sun—but not the NY Daily News. She now lives in Minneapolis, which she finds lovely and underrated, but does occasionally miss Manhattan and the Staten Island Ferry. Sarah would like to think she could again go backpacking across Europe, and she still loves to travel, but she knows that train has left the station. It's just so much quicker to fly.

About Deborah Caulfield Rybak

Deborah Caulfield Rybak

Senior editor Deborah Caulfield Rybak interviewed the Who’s Who of Hollywood during her years as an entertainment industry reporter at the Los Angeles Times. She still prefers writing about the arts to almost any other journalistic activity, so it’s a good thing we’ve got her on that beat at Sky. She’s pocketed numerous journalism awards and co-written three books.

But that’s just her journalistic cred: she’s also worked as an FM deejay in Aspen, a speechwriter in Washington and an environmental film festival director in Colorado. She considers herself happiest when she’s out of town—and out of cellphone range. She’s hitchhiked across Kenya, spent the night atop a pyramid in Central America, hovered face-to-mandible with giant manta rays during a night dive in Hawaii and hiked the High Atlas mountains in Morocco. Still left on her to do list: Bhutan and marlin fishing.

About Liz Doyle

Liz Doyle

After a few years navigating the trenches of New York's fashion scene as a stylist assistant at Harpers Bazaar, associate editor Liz Doyle is excited to be back in her childhood hometown of Minneapolis. When she isn't scouting the latest trends in fashion and travel, she moonlights at a local Parisian brasserie where she says "welcome" and "enjoy" a lot and occasionally tries to improve her French. Though her foray to the editorial side of the magazine industry is a new one, she welcomes the challenge and can't wait to see what this new adventure holds.

About Amanda Hoffstrom

Amanda Hoffstrom

Associate online editor Amanda Hoffstrom maintains the web and social media presence of Delta Sky. She enjoys using new media and exploring how different platforms enhance the reader experience. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Amanda lives in Minneapolis and has several destinations on her bucket list including Paris and Sydney. Future trips include St. Lucia, Seattle, Vancouver, London and New York. When she’s not in the office, she's a pop culture junkie, soaking up as many movies, television shows and magazines as possible.

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