Yahoo Autos Who needs an SUV? We drive a 1998 BMW Z3 down the Pacific Coast
It’s 10:15 am in Redwoods National Park, and it couldn’t possibly be more atmospheric: The ancient giants are shrouded in fog with a heavenly white sky beyond. Down below, the ferns and mosses are spackled in a fine mist with delicate pink flowers providing an unexpected pop of color amidst all that green. And back in the trail parking lot, providing its own quaint contrast amongst the monotone collection of minivans, family SUVs and heavy-duty pickups, is my little, Atlanta Blue 1998 BMW Z3.
There’s a certain “What the hell are you doing here?” about the whole scene, and judging by the surprised reactions of the various families walking by, I’m not alone in noticing. You see, besides being a locale typically visited by families or maybe couples, Redwoods National Park is in a remote part of one of the country’s most remote areas. Located at the uppermost part of California, it is a 5.5-hour drive from San Francisco and 3.5 hours from the nearest interstate. It was even a 1.5-hour drive from my overnight spot just over the Oregon border near the vast metropolis that is Crescent City, Calif. So yeah, you have to drive a really long way to get there, and not a lot of people are signing up to do that in a 25-year-old roadster.
But I did! I was moving from Portland to just outside Los Angeles, and needed to transport my Z3 the roughly 1,000 miles. Could I have towed it behind my ’13 BMW X5 xDrive35d or fenagled a Ram 3500 press truck or something? Probably, but what’s the fun in that? Could I have simply turned left in Portland onto I-5 and taken that the whole way? Probably, but my car totally sucks over 65 mph with the top up – it’s loud, there’s subtle buffeting, and semis are a bit scary. Also, what’s the fun in that?
Nope, I was going to “close the gap” on the stretch of Highway 101 I had never ventured, from roughly Yachats in the middle of the Oregon Coast down to Trinidad, Calif., about an hour south of the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. As I suspected, I had missed out on the most spectacular bit, the one that was most remote, the least interstate-like and the one absolutely best-suited for a top-down cruise. All those people in minivans, family SUVs and heavy-duty pickups don’t know what they’re missing.
