 |
| 2017 Fiat 124 Spider. |
I'm not the kind of guy who typically
drives when he can fly. I know, I know. It goes against the grain of
being a motoring journalist. Here's my philosophy, if it's far away
enough that flying is a consideration, then, given the choice, I'll
fly. I travel a fair amount for what I laughingly refer to as making
a living. Work-related travel, in particular, I'll leave to the
airlines – or, in my case, airline. I pretty much always fly Delta.
I've logged nearly 2 million miles on Delta. We have an understanding
of sorts: I make the reservation, and they get me where I'm going on
the day I want to go.....well, more often than not.
Typically, a work destination must be
within 150 miles or so for me to eschew flying for an overland slog.
There are exceptions, however. I make the 400-mile schlep between
Greenville, SC and Louisville, KY once or twice a year by car. When I
want to avoid locking myself into a return date, I'll drive the
nearly 1,400-mile round trip from Greenville to Delray Beach, FL.
But, these aren't work-related.
Breaking with tradition, I recently
chose to drive the 380 miles from Greenville to Franklin, TN for a
Nissan program. Nissan's North American headquarters is in Franklin,
which is about 20 miles south of Nashville. The event: The House the
Media Built.
 |
| Nissan has contributed some 90 or so trucks to Habitat for Humanity. |
Nissan has been very involved with
Habitat for Humanity since Hurricane Katrina. Contributing more than
$14 million in cash, around 90 pickup trucks and enough labor to
erect more than 80 homes, Nissan is, what you might call, committed
to this house-building charity.
 |
| A few of us hamming it up for the camera. |
Someone in Nissan's PR department got
the wacky idea to bring in three waves of journalists over the course
of a week to build a Habitat house. I say “wacky” because
automotive media does not have a reputation for breaking a sweat
during carmaker programs. Mostly we are coddled, pampered, fed,
housed, chauffeured and generally made to feel much more valuable
than we are. Yes, it's a great job, and I get weekends off.
I had been looking for an excuse to
request a
Fiat 124 Spider for a road trip. I had a late-September
boondoggle laid out that would have had me fly into Hartford, CT,
pick up a 124 and then drive north to Stowe, VT. It was all in the
name of enjoying the fall foliage and talking up a Stowe resort.
Sadly, there were some last-minute communication issues with the
resort, compelling me to back burner the Vermont trek to the spring.
Then along came Nissan with its Habitat
program. Nashville is even closer to Greenville than is Louisville.
So, why not drive? I thought. Fiat was happy to change my jumping off
point from Hartford to Greenville.
I don't know if you've noticed,
but the 124 Spider is on the small side. The Nashville trip would
require transporting all my video gear, clothes for three nights and
four days, work clothes, and a pair of cowboy boots – hey, it's
Nashville, after all. How would I stuff all of my gear and wardrobe
into the 124 without looking like the Clampets moving to Beverly?
Hills, that is. Swimmin' pools, movie stars....
I contacted the person in charge of
Fiat 124 PR and asked her to measure the actual dimensions of its
trunk. She e-mailed the info back
 |
| My new ECBC bag tucked into the 124's trunk. |
to me in less than an hour. I had
one small rollerboard that would fit into the Fiat's cargo hold, but
I needed another. ECBC is a California company specializing in small
bags well suited for airplane carry on and other personal-gear
duties. They offer two models that appeared to pass the 124-size
muster: Sparrow and Pegasus.
I wound up with the Pegasus. A
well-engineered bag targeting business travelers, it's a versatile
compact rollerboard that also converts to a backpack. For people who
fly and don't qualify for Precheck, it is uber convenient because it
has a laptop compartment that opens flat, so you don't need to remove
the laptop when going through screening. Lightweight, it holds a
surprising amount of stuff. And, it has a charger for juicing up a
smartphone or whatever. Retailing for $400, it sounds a bit pricey,
but its utility quickly defines its value. If you want an exercise in
frustration and futility, though, try searching for it online at a discounted
price. You would have better odds finding an Apple iPhone 7
discounted.
 |
| When flying, you can simply unzip the Pegasus laptop pocket, open it and run the bag through x-ray. |
I was able to stack my two rollerboards
on top of one another in the 124's trunk and still had room on either
side for my boot bag and some outer wear. I'm a firm believer in
driving a convertible with the top dropped unless it's raining. I
needed a cap to keep the sun from frying my melon and a couple of
jackets of varying warmth for late-night motoring. My backpack
hitched a ride on the passenger seat.
The 124 Spider Fiat provided for this
adventure was a 2017 Lusso: the mid-range grade. I would have
preferred the standard 6-speed manual transmission, but my test 124
used the optional 6-speed automatic tranny to transfer output from
the 160-horsepower 1.4-liter turbo to the rear wheels. This
powertrain delivered 36 mpg on the highway, where I performed the
bulk of my driving. Engineered for the twisties, the 124 really
shinned on the mountain roads. Anyone much taller than six feet might
not want to spend hours in this cockpit, but I found it comfortable
and easy to live with. The top is a bit of mechanical genius. Just
about anyone can easily raise and lower it from the driver's seat.
I viewed this 360-mile endeavor as an
opportunity to drop in on one of my fraternity brothers and his wife
in Lenior City, TN, which is just west of Knoxville. I spend three or
four weekends a year with them. With that in mind, my route took me
north on SC 25 to about 25 miles south of Asheville, NC where I
hooked up with I-26 North before transferring to I-40 West for the
final 130-mile run to Lenior City.
About 25 miles of I-40 between
Asheville and Knoxville are across the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's a
delicious array of sweeping curves and elevation changes. I have
driven this route dozens of times and am always frustrated with its
55-miles-per-hour speed limit. Even more so when driving a little
roadster engineered to straighten the most severe of corners. Did I
strictly maintain the posted limit? No clue; I was far too engaged
whipping the steering wheel from right to left and back as I took
curve after curve dodging plodding minivans and avoiding struggling
18 wheelers.
A commitment in Greenville prevented my
setting sail until early afternoon on Saturday, but I still reached
my destination well before the ribeyes came off the grill. My
next-day's travel continued west on I-40 for roughly 150 miles to
Nashville and then south 20-or-so miles to Franklin.
Nissan hosted us at the Marriott Hotel
near its headquarters. Typically, carmakers put us up at staggeringly
exclusive hotels and resorts for events, but this event was anything
but typical. Up at oh-dark-thirty on Monday morning and loaded two by
two into Nissan Titans, we drove to the Habitat build site in
Antioch, TN for breakfast and a briefing on the what to expect for
the day.
 |
| We started with a blank slab at 9 a.m. |
 |
| And finished here at 4 p.m. |
I embarked on this event expecting the
media to contribute little in the way of actual construction work.
Again, this is a group of people unfamiliar with fetching their own
breakfast coffee on carmaker events. The idea of us carrying,
hammering, sawing and climbing ladders simply did not compute. Boy,
was I ever off the mark. After handing out hardhats, work gloves,
nail aprons and pencils, a half-dozen building supervisors divvied us
up into teams.
As the first wave of media, we faced a
bare concrete slab. We worked for three hours, beginning at 9 a.m.,
broke for an hour's lunch and then worked three hours before quitting
and heading back to the hotel. In six hours we erected all of the
interior and exterior walls, as well as setting one of the roof
trusses in place.
Nissan's plan was for media to arrive
on the first day, work the second day and fly home on the third. A
buddy and I requested that we be able to stay an extra day. We wanted
to contribute more than one day's work, but we also wanted some time
to shoot video, interview Habitat people and so forth. That wasn't
the only part of the schedule where we went off the reservation.
 |
| Vince Gil on the right playing with The Time Jumpers. |
Nearly every Monday Night, the Western
swing group The Time Jumpers, including the amazing Vince Gill,
perform at a joint just off Nashville's Broadway called 3
rd
& Lindsley. Two of us sneaked off with one of the Nissan PR
people and his wife for the evening that finished up there. What a
night!
Joining the second media wave, we
returned to the build site the next morning. I contributed work all
morning, but at the lunch break, I shifted into video mode. Knocking
out three
just3things videos, I finished in time to put in a little
more work before heading back to the hotel.
Here's what you need to know about
Habitat for Humanity: Volunteering is more fun than it is work. Yes,
it's several hours of real labor, but the supervisors are more like
teachers than task masters. I do a lot of remodeling around my house,
but I still learned some things working with these experts. It was as
fulfilling a two days as I've ever spent.
I popped out of bed early Wednesday
morning, ate breakfast with a couple of pals and then pointed the 124
Spider toward home. My
 |
| The finished product! |
test 124 didn't have a navi unit; so, I used
Google Maps to call out directions. Rather than routing me back
through Nashville, Knoxville and Asheville, it took me through
Chattanooga and Atlanta. It's about 15 miles longer that way, but it
was a change of scenery....well, at least until I arrived in Atlanta.
I slug my way between Greenville and Atlanta on a regular basis.
Basically, though, I drove about 750
miles with the top dropped. I crammed a lot of activity into five
days; however, it left me smiling.
