Boxster Road Trip

With only five days to go, we are down to the last minute thoughts and things to do.  We decided it would be a good idea to put a coat of wax on the car before we leave (knowing we will encounter a few bugs along the way)!  Stopped by America’s Tire and had them check the tires (including the spare).  Tires are good to go!

We have been watching the weather and that seems to be hubby’s biggest concern.  He has only lived in the Bay Area and in Maryland, so the rest of the country’s weather is a mystery to him.  He is convinced we will be chased across the Midwest by tornados and that we will have to park the Boxster in high-rise parking lots to avoid the floods.  I just chuckle.  He is in for the trip of his life!

We decided it would be prudent to actually pack our bags and see if they actually fit into the Boxster.  If we were traveling in an RV or even an SUV, space would not be a problem.  But we are traveling in a Porsche Boxster, with limited trunk space (and even more limited cabin space), so testing to make sure it all fits was worth the effort.

This is what it looked like before we started loading.

Front Trunk aka The Bonnet. . .

Rear Trunk aka The Boot. . .

A year or so ago I bought luggage (as a birthday present for hubby) specifically designed to fit in the Boxster from RoadTrip Luggage.  The luggage is well designed and well made; however, in our case, it does not fit the Boxster as shown on their website because we have a spare tire.  I believe that Porsche removed the spare tire in later years, but since our car is one of the very early Boxsters (I bought it in 1997), it does have a spare.  We considered removing the spare to allow for more luggage space (and just carry a can of fix-a-flat), but decided the safety factor of having a spare outweighs the space we would gain.  And we want to keep the car in its original condition!

So we packed our bags and they fit!  However, we could only fit three of the four bags we bought from RoadTrip Luggage and we had to be creative on how to make them fit.  We even have room for our pillows!   But I’ve been told there is no room for any purchases, so no shopping allowed.  Ha!  There is always the option to ship things home!

This is what the front trunk (bonnet) looks like packed, with and without the pillows!

And the rear trunk (boot) . . .

Looks like we are gonna make it after all!

And the count down begins . . .

I wanted to put together a summary of prior posts because I’ve finally figured out how to link this post to Facebook (I know, I am sometimes technically challenged!).

The Dream

Going on a 48 state (and 2 province) road trip in our 1998 Porsche Boxster and taking our own sweet time seeing our beautiful county.  The plan is to take the northern route from the Bay Area to Boston, timing it so we arrive in Boston in mid-October, to experience the autumn colors.  Then we take the southern route home.

Haunted on Halloween!

We traded our Marriott Kauai Beach Club timeshare week for a week at Marriott’s Custom House in Boston and, lucky for us, we got the week of October 10 through 17.  During our planning, we discovered airbnb and we have now booked almost our entire trip staying at airbnb places.  Our belief is that we can get a much better experience of a local area by staying with the locals.  In the case of October 31st, it turns out I booked a room in a haunted house (the house is actually on the hanted house tour that evening).  How fun is that?  Needless to say, I will be sharing our experiences in the daily blog (once we hit the road).

Getting the 1998 Porsche Boxster Ready for a 15K Mile Trip

There are things you must do (like getting the car serviced, getting new tires, replacing front struts) and things you just want to do (like replacing the sound system).  We did do all of the mandatory stuff and then moved on to the fun stuff.  We drove up to Car Audio Innovations in Roseville where Rod and his team did a significant upgrade to our sound system.  We now have a Hertz Amplifier and Focal Speakers, and this breathes life into our awesome Kenwood Excelon KDC-X997 Receiver.

I also bought some great after market cup holders from Mike at Ultimate Cupholders (this was a shortcoming in the early Boxsters).

Software, Hardware and other “Techie” Stuff

We chose My Scenic Drives to do the trip planning and we bought a National Geographic Road Atlas (Adventure Edition) for a hardcopy.  I still like something I can write on.  We bought a Garmin nüvi® 50LM and then replaced it with a nüvi® 3590LMT (because the 50LM only allowed for one waypoint).

Put Another Nickel In . . .

Music, music, music!  We have all of our music in MediaMonkey and we have spent the last three months rating it, so we could put the best of our library on a “stick” (or thumb drive, for you techies).  We finished that project today.

So that is about where we are with less than a month to go.

I’ll be blogging about the packing (and seeing if it all fits) next.

Stay tuned . . .