There's nothing like a really big trip in a really small vehicle. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in a ship shorter than a tennis court. Charles Lindbergh soloed the Atlantic in a cockpit smaller than a phone booth.
For the rest of us, there's the epic trip in a little car. When I was 19, my brother Rob and I set out across Canada in an Opel Kadett, an economy machine my parents had shipped back from Europe. Our task was to drive it from Nova Scotia to Vancouver.
The Opel was burning oil, it had no radio and one of the wheel bearings was making suspicious noises. None of this mattered: We were off on a grand, 6,000-kilometre adventure. We threw tools in the trunk, packed a few cans of engine oil and headed west.
Most would say the little red Opel was overmatched for such a trip. Its engine was a mere 1.1 litres (one of my friends dismissed it as a "sewing machine"). But the Opel carried me and my brother through the deep woods of Northern Ontario and across the golden reaches of Saskatchewan beneath a sky that hung above us like a gigantic blue dome. It chugged up the ramparts of the Rocky Mountains and coasted down the other side, delivering us unto the beautiful Pacific Coast. We had the trip of our lives in a car that cost next to nothing.
Back then, everyone in my peer group had a small, cheap car. And we all travelled a lot. In the decades that have passed since that trans-Canada odyssey, I've noticed that my friends' cars got bigger and their trips got smaller. Gone were the passionate days when they would grab the keys and light out for the other side of the continent at the drop of a hat, like a real-life version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
By the time we turned 40, most of us had large, comfy machines, but no one did long drives any more – for anything more than a few hundred kilometres, everyone bought an airline ticket. Now, everyone insists on a large, comfortable car for even a moderate trip.
What happened to the big trip in the little car? In John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family moved to California in a Model T. My friend Herrie ten Cate sent pictures of a trip his family took through the Rockies in the 1960s, when he was a boy. Their car was a VW Beetle. At the wheel was Herrie's dad. Beside his dad, in the passenger seat, was Herrie's grandmother. In the back seat were Herrie, his sister, his mother and their dog – which spent a good part of the trip with its head protruding from the open sunroof.
Herrie's summation: "A true epic family road trip before the days of seat belts and child seats."
Herrie's recollection brought back some of my own, like the time I drove from Brussels to Munich and back with three friends in my 1967 Fiat 600, a machine only slightly longer than a Smart car. Then there were the five solo drives I made across Canada in VW Beetles, one of them so mechanically dodgy that I ended up pulling out the engine in Northern Ontario for a roadside clutch replacement.
I grew up in a household defined by automotive minimalism. We spent my childhood years in Europe and Africa, where small cars were a way of life. Back in Canada, my father resisted the North American urge to go big – while other parents bought Country Squire wagons and loaded Buick touring sedans, my dad always stuck with compacts. We took long family trips in a Mercury Comet with hand-cranked windows and no air conditioning.
In my teens, we moved back to Europe, where my taste for small cars was reinforced – in the narrow, crowded streets of Brussels and Paris, cars like the VW Beetle and my Fiat 600 made sense.
Small cars and big trips were in my blood. In Canada, I remained a minimalist. Although my wife and I briefly owned a minivan, our family car through most of our child-rearing years was a 1988 Honda Civic that we bought new and kept for a decade and a half. We ordered the Civic without a radio or air conditioning (like father, like son). The Civic was small and rudimentary, but we routinely pulled off family trips that took us from Toronto to Nova Scotia, down the East Coast to Georgia and back again. Our typical load manifest included two children, two or three bicycles, a hang glider and, on occasion, two cats. Our friends were incredulous, but to us, it was no big deal.
As we got older, we softened. When the Civic wore out, we replaced it with an Accord, which felt huge and luxurious, even though it was classified as a mid-sized sedan. We put more than 180,000 kilometres on it in six years.
Several friends said we should get something bigger. But of all the big trips I'd made in small cars – when it comes to the vehicle and the journey – it's best to keep them in inverse proportion.
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