Last week I celebrated my 45th birthday and my family went over the top to compensate for quarantine. Din Tai Fung delivered, scratch made cheesecake, a freakin homemade piñata and good family time. I’m a very lucky man. I have a great family, health, a career that challenges me and brings me joy. I’m basically marinating in my own privilege and well aware of how easy I have it compared to many.

That being said, COVID quarantine still sucks and it’s taking a toll on the family. We are all under a lot of pressure and there is a constant undercurrent of strong emotions right below the surface. Sometimes fear, sometimes anger, sometimes nostalgia…we are always hovering close to emotional exhaustion.

We are helping each other find ways to cope. For Meg that means things like Dance Church, Yoga and afternoons spent reading by the beach. For Gabe, it means long bike rides and finding ways to minimize his remote school load. For Shep it means lots of unstructured play time and allowing him to sleep in our bed (only for now…how long can it last right?). For me, it means getting into my car and driving someplace far away. At least as far as I can go without needing to stop for anything which for me, turns out to be around 6 hours roundtrip.

Yesterday, I jumped in the Porsche with State Route 10 in mind. You can pickup SR 10 in Cle Elum and drive the 16 mile scenic road to Ellensburg. Fortunately, pretty much the entire drive out there qualifies as scenic. Heading East on I 90 through Snoqualmie Pass is a fast, beautiful drive. With low traffic and countermeasures in place…sometimes quite fast 🙂

The first stop was in Roslyn, WA, home of Roslyns Cafe. Fans of Northern Exposure may recognize this small town as the filming location for much of the show that supposedly took place in Alaska. The Cafe is still in operation and still has the famous mural.

The skies were suppose to be clear, but I got dumped on from North Bend all the way to Cle Elum which meant my clean car was going to be filthy for any photos. That’s okay…my car looks better in black and white anyway which does a lot to hide the dirt and bad lighting 🙂

The skies cleared up before SR 10 and I had a great time. It sits above or right next to the Yakima River and the scenic views are nonstop. I didn’t spend too much time taking photographs given how dirty my car was so I mostly just enjoyed driving up and down this beautiful road.

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On the way home, I came across another black 911 Turbo that is the same generation as mine, a 997. Their car was a euro spec 997.1 TT whereas mine is a US spec 997.2 TTS. It was fun to run with each other for a few miles before they took an earlier exit. I was struck by how beautiful their car was to watch move down the road, watching it change lanes and listening to the engine noise. I started to feel a bit jealous. Then I realized that I’m in an upgraded version of the same damn car!! There is a life lesson for me in there somewhere…

To help us maintain our sanity during the COVID-19 quarantine in Seattle (and around the world), Meg and I take turns giving each other a break from adulting. She spends her days doing cool things like yoga, reading by the beach, art projects. I spend my days off driving…anyplace…just driving as far and as fast as I can go without going to jail or needing to pee 🙂

The trick with the quarantine is that I want to be totally responsible and respectful of social distancing so I just never get out of my car. No food stops, no bathroom breaks, just solo driving in a car fast enough to hopefully outrun the virus!

Today’s escape was back to Chuckanut Drive. It was about a four hour roundtrip drive from West Seattle, up almost to Bellingham and then right back home. Beautiful scenery, a fun twisty road and great weather made it the perfect escape.

Okay, so I lied. I forgot that I did pull a u-turn in the middle of the road and risk my tires to a gravel parking lot because I saw a cool street art mural and wanted to get a quick photo. Nobody was within 1000 feet of me!

One of my favorite features of the 911 is the factory aero kit that it came with. I love the fixed rear spoiler so much more than the pop-up spoiler that came on the car as standard. The aero kit included the larger fixed rear spoiler and a more aggressive front chin spoiler which was painted to match the car. Looks amazing. The downside is that the normal front spoiler is low and scrapes easily…the aero chin spoiler scrapes every day!

Normally these chin spoiler are considered a “consumable” part. They are cheap and easy to replace. The fancy painted aero kit spoiler not so much. To preserve my original painted one, I purchased a very cheap knock off spoiler from eBay. At only $95, these knock offs can take the abuse and get replaced every year. Here is the photo of my son helping me swap the painted spoiler for this cheap one:

We managed to get it to fit although it took some convincing with a heat gun …would have been better to do this in the summer when the sun could have warmed up the plastic a bit. I wasn’t happy with the color which was too much of a contrast from the painted black. Time for Plasti Dip!

I picked up a few cans of black Plasti Dip and a can of the Glossifier and I had a great time with my boys painting the spoiler. We should have done this before we installed the part…would have been much easier. I just wasn’t sure I was going to go this route until I saw it on the car.

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This is a “right sized” solution to the problem but is far from perfect. The knock off spoiler is a good but not great. After 7 coats of Plasti Dip and a few coats of the Glossifier, it looks much better than the grayish plastic look it had before but is not nearly as pretty as the painted factory spoiler. I didn’t expect that from a $100 part and Plasti Dip. If I wanted perfection, I wouldn’t have given the spray can to my 9 year old and 12 year old sons 🙂 In the end we had a fun car project and I’ll need to replace this part again in a year anyway!

My car came with an upgraded exhaust which I love the sound of. It has a SpeedTech 3″ X-Pipe Muffler Delete exhaust with the stock Porsche catalytic converters and stock exhaust tips. I wanted to play around with some video and sound equipment and decided to make a video showcasing the deep and exotic sound of the exhaust.

I managed to capture a good cold startup sound which I love and then I spent a quarantine evening driving around Seattle at night (never leaving the car) with the car mic’ed up. I screwed up the mic settings and the sound was clipping so I turned the middle of this video into a nighttime time-lapse video of a mostly empty Seattle during the COVID-19 crisis. The next day I fixed my mic issues so I included some footage and sound clips of the exhaust. Overall, kind of a schizophrenic video but it was fun to make anyway 🙂

Here is just the nighttime time-lapse video of Seattle if you don’t care about the exhaust…and really, why would you!

I needed to clear my head after a crazy week of quarantine and decided a 230 mile drive from Seattle to Lake Crescent and back was just the ticket. A nice long drive out there without any traffic and then a beautifully twisty lake road rewards you on arrival. You just need to time it right if there are other cars so you have plenty of space in front of you…I caught up to traffic a few times but would just pull over and enjoy the view.

I never left the car once…didn’t even hit a drive thru. Thanks to my amazing wife, Meghan, for enabling my momentary escape!

While I was out there, I managed to find some closed backroads to play around with Dragy (a small GPS device and app) that records various time intervals with a cool video overlay!

This was done in sport mode and without launch control, just mashing the gas pedal. 0 to 60 in 3.38 and 0 to 100 in a little over 7. With sport plus and launch control I should be around 2.9 0 to 60 but I want to save that for an actual track.

My personalized license plate arrived in the mail today. My kids and I thought it was perfect for an all black 911 Turbo S…it just screams The Dark Side!

It’s a crazy time in the world with the growing concerns of the coronavirus and living in Seattle puts us in the epicenter of things in the US. I’m working from home and the kids are home schooling for the foreseeable future. We are all being asked to limit social interactions as much as possible. To stay sane, I took the boys on a long hike but we stopped in to check on a few cars first. Being sure to stay far away from people and wash our hands constantly!

As always, The Shop had a ton of nice cars on display including three stunning, race ready Vipers. The guy that owns and races them was there to walk me through each one and damn they look cool.

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A few photos from the hike, as proof that we didn’t spend all day looking at cars 🙂

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