Drive, He Said

Drive, He Said

April 28th, 2007 at 07:36am Michael Conniff 2

CARMEL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA—The key, you see, is to take your foot off the break as you head downhill into the abyss and to trust absolutely the worlds of Justin Demayeo when he says: “You feel that?”

Yeah, I felt it all right—a deep-throated Gremlin of a sound that more or less defines the Land Rover Driving Experience here at the luxe Quail Lodge Resort and Golf Club. We—the fiancée, me, and Justin—have more than 100 acres to play around in before we hit the outer limits of the Quail Lodge, one of three such off-road Land Rover extravaganzas.

The first thing you learn is that it never hurts to go slow as in S-L-O-W. We learn about slow from Justin way before we learn about “rescue,” that awkward moment, never far from the present, when you might need to use Justin’s walkie-talkie to yank you from the slush.

But back to that growling sound. The sound means the automatic Land Rover system on the Sport HSE is kicking into place as soon as you have the guts to take your tootsie off the brake. I know: it’s counter-intuitive: you’re heading down a gnarly slope so steep you can’t even see the bottom of the path over the top of your hood, and you’re supposed to take your foot off the break.

Instead, what you do is line up is line up the wheels that you can see them straighten out on the LCD on the dashboard, take your foot off the brake, and hope and pray the damn thing works—which, needless to say, it always does on this particular Land Rover Sport. Justin, our teacher from the driving school, does a remarkable job of telling us what we need to know about knowing our vehicle and the down-low on what you need to know about terrain and trees if you really want to get high on off-road driving.

And there it is, at our fingertips: a whole new sport that takes you places you never thought you’d see. I think of Animal Planet and Range Rovers rushing through the brush—or is it the bush? I find myself maneuvering the rented Nissan Sentra in traffic with a whole new sense of drama. After the Land Rover driving experience, to boldly go where you have never gone before, you merely turn the key and growl.

Entry Filed under: Hotels, Transportation, Travel, Outdoors, Fractional Post, The West, Aspen Life Post