PEKING TO PARIS

A road-trip memoir from an author who has “a love-hate relationship with adventure.”

Why did a woman who suffers from carsickness, has no sense of direction and hates roughing it accompany her husband on a grueling five-week, 7,800-mile rally through China, Mongolia, Russia and Europe? After selling their software company and settling on a ranch in Colorado, Bennett and her husband, Bernard, grew restless. After two decades of marriage, they had “grown nonchalant about our togetherness. We needed a new project, something that would pull us off our separate paths and merge us into a team again.” At a lunch stop for the Colorado Grand classic car tour, Bernard had a chance encounter that offered up a challenge: a 35-day race following the silk route taken by Genghis Khan  on the centenary of the original Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. All they needed was determination, money and a classic car. So began a two-year project to find, rebuild and drive the perfect prewar automobile. They settled on a 1940 GM LaSalle two-door coupe, affectionately named Roxanne. But the rebuild took longer than expected, and Bennett and Bernard had no chance to road test the work and learn the nuances of GPS navigation. This led to a structural problem that plagued them throughout the journey. While Bennett longed to see the landscape and experience the local culture, they ended up driving 10 hours per day and spending their off days in various garage bays. “This trip is all about driving and not about the journey,” she lamented. Yet her writing captures the beauty of the austere landscape, changing social dynamics with other teams and the nuances of her shifting relationship with her husband.

A fun ride, worth the trip.