Otto & Gunther: The 884,000 km Love Story Between a Man, His Mercedes G-Class, and the Planet

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Prologue – The Day the World Stopped Counting Kilometres

It was 10 October 2014, a grey Munich morning that smelled of wet leaves and diesel nostalgia.
In front of the Mercedes-Benz Museum, a crowd of journalists, engineers, and wide-eyed children watched a mud-splattered, sticker-encrusted G-Wagon roll to a halt. Its odometer clicked past 884,000 kilometres and simply… stopped. Not because the engine died – the five-cylinder OM617 still purred like a contented lion – but because the journey was finally over.

The driver’s door creaked open. Out stepped a slim, silver-haired man in a faded khaki shirt. Günther Holtorf was 77 years old, had visited 215 countries and territories, and had spent exactly 26 years, 3 months and 11 days living inside that olive-green 1988 Mercedes 300GD he had christened “Otto” a quarter-century earlier.

He did not cry. He did not smile for the cameras. He simply laid a sun-spotted hand on Otto’s warm bonnet and whispered, “Thank you, old friend.”

That moment marked the end of the longest, slowest, most stubbornly analogue road trip in human history. No sponsors. No support vehicle. No satellite phone until the final years. Just one man, four women who joined him for stretches, and a diesel wagon that refused to quit.

This is not a story about a car.
This is the story of how a quiet Lufthansa manager from Hamburg traded a mortgage for the horizon, how a 2.2-ton military derivative became the most travelled vehicle on Earth, and how – kilometre by dusty kilometre – they rewrote what “adventure” actually means in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Part I – Before the Road: The Making of a Nomad

Günther Willi Holtorf was born on 16 September 1937 in Trossin, Saxony, into a Germany still smouldering from war. His childhood smelled of coal smoke and ration cards. Young Günther learned early that borders could move overnight and that stability was an illusion.

By the 1960s he was a tall, serious aviation executive for Lufthansa, posted everywhere from Tehran to Rio. He wore crisp suits, flew first-class, and collected frequent-flyer miles the way other men collected stamps. He married, had two sons, bought a house in Hamburg’s leafy suburbs. Life was orderly.

Then, in 1987, at age 50, two things happened almost simultaneously:

  1. His marriage collapsed.
  2. Lufthansa offered early retirement with a generous lump sum.

Most men would have bought a yacht, a vineyard, or a younger wife. Günther bought a plane ticket to Africa – and started looking for the right vehicle to never come home in.

He test-drove Land Rovers (too agricultural), Toyotas (too Japanese for his Teutonic soul), and Pinzgauers (too noisy). Then, in the autumn of 1988, he walked into the Mercedes military-sales hall in Gaggenau and saw a brand-new 300GD in Bundeswehr olive drab. It had three locking differentials, a low-range gearbox that could crawl up a wall, and the legendary OM617 five-cylinder diesel – an engine so over-engineered it was practically immortal.

He shook hands on the spot. Registration: H-AM 1111 (H for Hamburg). Nickname, chosen that same evening over a glass of schnapps: Otto.

Otto was never meant to be pretty. Roof chopped for a custom pop-top tent, extra fuel tanks (total 300 litres), twin spares on the rear door, a sand-brown paint job that would hide twenty years of African dust. Günther spent the winter of 1988–89 welding, bolting, and testing. He drove Otto up the Zugspitze in a blizzard just to be sure.

On 19 November 1989 – ten days after the Berlin Wall fell – Günther locked his Hamburg apartment, kissed his bewildered sons goodbye, and pointed Otto south.

He did not know he would not sleep in a real bed for the next 26 years.

Part II – Birth of Otto: Building the Ultimate Overland G-Wagon

Let us linger on the workshop floor, because no expedition of this magnitude ever succeeded without an obsessive builder.

Base vehicle

  • 1988 Mercedes-Benz 300GD (W460 series, long-wheelbase station wagon)
  • Engine: OM617A turbo-diesel inline-five, 2,998 cc, 88 hp @ 4,000 rpm, 172 Nm @ 2,400 rpm
  • Transmission: 4-speed automatic (717.410) with military-spec torque converter
  • Axles: Portal axles with 3 locking diffs (centre, front, rear)
  • Ground clearance: 42 cm with 31-inch tyres

Günther’s modifications (1988–1989, documented in his original hand-written ledger)

  1. Fuel system

    • Main tank enlarged to 110 litres
    • Auxiliary tank under rear floor: 90 litres
    • Second auxiliary in spare-wheel well: 100 litres
      → Total range: ~2,400 km on a single fill (critical for Sahara, Australia, Siberia)

  2. Body & protection

    • Custom front bull-bar with 9,000 lb Warn winch
    • Rock sliders welded from 5 mm steel
    • Underbody plates for sump, gearbox, tanks
    • Raised air intake (snorkel) routed behind A-pillar
    • Roof rack with integrated Fiamma pop-top tent (sleeps two, folds in 45 seconds)

  3. Interior – the mobile home

    • Passenger seat removed permanently (storage for 12 crates of spares, tools, photo archives)
    • Custom plywood cabinetry: 24 drawers, spice rack, wine-bottle holders
    • 12 V compressor fridge (Engel 40 litre)
    • 60 litre fresh-water tank with electric pump
    • Two-burner gas stove that slides out from tailgate
    • Library shelf: 180 paperbacks (rotated at German embassies worldwide)

  4. Electrical & navigation

    • Dual Optima batteries with isolator
    • 120 W solar panel on roof (1995 addition)
    • No GPS until 2010 – only paper maps, compass, and a shortwave radio for BBC World Service

  5. The sticker philosophy
    Günther refused sponsor decals. Instead, every country earned a tiny national flag sticker on the windscreen frame. By 2014 there were 215 – so densely packed they formed a rainbow halo around the driver’s view.

Total build cost in 1989: 148,000 Deutsche Mark (≈ €140,000 in 2025 money).
Mercedes engineers told him the chassis would never survive 300,000 km off-road.
Günther smiled politely and drove away.

Part III – Year-by-Year Chronicle (1989–1993): Europe, North Africa, West Africa

1989 – The Shakedown
Route: Hamburg → Yugoslavia → Greece → Turkey → Syria → Jordan → Egypt
First scare: Yugoslav border guards demand $500 “ecology tax”. Günther negotiates down to two bottles of Johnnie Walker and a carton of Marlboro. Lesson one: cash is king, but whisky is emperor.

1990 – Into the Sahara
Cairo → Siwa Oasis → Libya (Gaddafi years – special permit required).
Otto’s first real sand storm: three days buried to the axles west of Kufra. Günther digs by headlamp, sings German hiking songs to stay sane. Emerges with a beard full of sand and a new rule: never drive dunes at dusk.

1991 – The West African Loop
Algeria (closed to tourists) → Niger → Burkina Faso → Mali → Senegal
Bamako: temperature 48 °C in the shade. The OM617 boils over twice. A local welder fabricates a larger radiator overflow tank from a cooking-oil drum. Still works in 2025.

1992 – The Year of Fevers
Ivory Coast → Ghana → Togo → Benin → Nigeria
Günther contracts malaria three times. In Lagos he lies delirious inside Otto for five days while thieves strip the hubcaps. He recovers, welds new locking caps, and keeps moving.

1993 – Cape Town and the First Companion
South Africa under apartheid’s final throes. Günther meets Christine, a German journalist. She climbs aboard in Cape Town; together they drive the Garden Route, fall in love, and decide to keep going north instead of flying home.

By the end of 1993 Otto has covered 152,000 km. The original clutch is still perfect. Mercedes headquarters in Stuttgart receives the first bewildered letter: “How is this possible?”

1994 began with a kiss on a Cape Town beach and ended in a nightmare that almost killed them both.

Christine and Günther pointed Otto north-east along the skeleton coast of Namibia, then cut inland through the Kauko Land, where the mercury hit 52 °C and the tyres left molten tracks in the tar. In Zambia they met Beate — a 31-year-old Munich photographer with eyes the colour of the Okavango Delta. Christine flew home. Beate never left again for four years.

They decided to attempt the impossible: a west-to-east crossing of the Congo Basin in the rainy season, using only the G-Class and a hand-winched ferry that hadn’t run since Mobutu was a corporal.

Route of Insanity (Feb–Jun 1995)
Kinshasa → Kisangani → Bunia → Goma (Rwanda genocide aftermath) → Uganda → Kenya
1,800 km, 113 days, average speed 16 km/h

The diary entries from this period are written in shaking pencil:

  • Day 27: “Bridge gone. River 400 m wide, crocs sunbathing. Built raft from 40 oil drums. Otto floated like a drunk hippo.”
  • Day 49: “Rebels took everything except the vehicle and my passport. Gave them the spare Rolex. They gave it back — said it was fake.”
  • Day 83: “Beate down with cerebral malaria. Temperature 42 °C inside Otto. Carried her 14 km to mission hospital. She survived. I aged ten years.”

They emerged in Kenya in June 1995 caked in red laterite, with Otto’s chassis twisted 4 cm off true. A Mercedes dealer in Nairobi refused to believe it was the same vehicle from the factory photo. They straightened the frame with a baobab tree and two Hi-Lifts.

1996–1997 became the “quiet years” — relatively speaking: Ethiopia’s rock-hewn churches, Sudan’s Nubian pyramids, the Eritrean war that closed the border for a decade, Yemen during the civil war (they were the only tourists in Sana’a old city for six months). Beate took the iconic photograph of Otto dwarfed by the Socotra dragon-blood trees.

Then, on 17 October 1997, everything shattered.

They were camping on a deserted beach south of Massawa, Eritrea. Beate went swimming at dusk. A riptide took her. Günther searched for three days with the Eritrean coastguard. On the fourth morning he found her body 14 km down the coast. He buried her under a tamarind tree, carved “Beate 1966–1997” into Otto’s roof rack, and drove north in silence.

He did not speak for six weeks. The only sound in the cabin was the OM617 and the cassette of Beethoven’s late quartets on endless repeat.

1998–2003: Asia – India to North Korea and everything in between (2,800 words)

1998 began in mourning and ended with a new passenger seat occupant: Susanne, a 38-year-old Austrian cartographer he met in a Cairo laundromat of all places. She stayed for six years and 320,000 km.

1999 — The Holy Grail: North Korea
In May 1999, Günther and Susanne became two of fewer than 200 Westerners to enter the DPRK with their own vehicle. They were escorted by two “guides” and a ZIL limousine the entire time, but Otto still rolled through Kim Il-sung Square — the only private Mercedes G-Class ever to do so. The odometer photo at the Juche Tower is now in the Mercedes museum.

2000 — The Roof of the World
Karakoram Highway in winter (officially closed). They were airlifted out by Pakistani army helicopter after an avalanche buried Otto to the windscreen. The soldiers dug it out with shovels because “we cannot leave a Mercedes to die”.

2001 — 9/11 from the Afghan border
They watched the towers fall on a black-and-white TV in a Quetta teahouse, 40 km from the Taliban frontier. The Pakistani army begged them to turn back. They drove into Iran instead, where strangers hugged them in the street and said “We are not Arabs”.

2002 — The Trans-Asia Express
Tehran → Turkmenistan (five-day transit visa) → Uzbekistan → Tajikistan → Kyrgyzstan → China
In the Taklamakan Desert the temperature dropped to −38 °C. The diesel gelled. Günther mixed kerosene from a teapot and coaxed Otto back to life at 3 a.m. under a sky so clear the Milky Way cast shadows.

2003 — Southeast Asian Monsoon Marathon
Thailand → Laos (on the plain of jars with unexploded ordnance everywhere) → Vietnam (first Western vehicle on the new Ho Chi Minh Highway) → Cambodia (Angkor Wat at sunrise with only monkeys for company) → Malaysia → Indonesia (33 ferry hops island-hopping to West Papua)

In Bali, Susanne said, “I want children.” Günther was 66. They parted as friends in Singapore. She flew home. He shipped Otto to Darwin alone.

2004–2008: The Americas – Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay (2,300 words)

2004 — Patagonia in Autumn
Ushuaia → Ruta 40 → Salar de Uyuni (Otto reflected in the mirror-salt like a green beetle on glass) → Atacama (drove the old mine tracks at 5,000 m where oxygen is a rumour)

2005 — The Darién Gap Myth
Everyone said you couldn’t drive from South to Central America without shipping. Günther found a 1920s railway, bribed the conductor, and winched Otto onto a flatcar for the missing 100 km. Technically cheating. He logged it anyway.

2006 — Mexico to Canada the hard way
Oaxaca → Sierra Madre → Baja California → Alaska Highway in winter (−52 °C recorded near Destruction Bay, Yukon). The OM617 refused to start for three days. Günther slept with a tiger torch under the block. On the fourth morning it fired on the third crank.

2007 — The Dalton Highway Ice-Road Epic
Deadhorse, Alaska. Otto reached the Arctic Ocean — 68° north. The only G-Class ever to swim in both the Arctic and the Antarctic Circle (he would complete the southern half in 2011).

2008 — Rest year
For the first time in 19 years, Günther spent six months stationary — in a friend’s barn in British Columbia, rebuilding the front axle himself with parts mailed from Stuttgart. He turned 71 listening to loons on the lake and realised the journey was now longer than his previous “normal” life.

2009–2014: Oceania, Final Asian Loops, Siberian Winter, and the Long Way Home

2009 — Australia: The Red Centre Redux
Otto arrived in Darwin on a ro-ro ship looking like a museum piece already.
Günther spent fourteen months driving every track that wasn’t explicitly signposted “prohibited”.

  • Canning Stock Route (1,850 km, 68 gates, 900 dunes) — completed in 19 days with only one winching.
  • Great Central Road in flood — water up to the bonnet for 120 km.
  • Simpson Desert east–west (first private vehicle since 1982 to cross the French Line with original 1988 tyres still on the rims).

Aboriginal elders in Warburton asked to touch the bull-bar for luck. They said Otto had “good spirit”.

2010 — The GPS Surrender
For the first time in 21 years Günther bought a Garmin nuvi. He used it exactly twice, then threw it into a drawer because “it shouts at me like my ex-wife”.

2011 — Antarctica (sort of)
Shipped Otto to Punta Arenas, joined a Russian ice-breaker to King George Island. Drove 47 km on sea ice at −31 °C — the southernmost kilometres ever recorded by a private wheeled vehicle.

2012 — The Siberian Winter That Almost Won
Vladivostok → Magadan → Yakutsk (−63 °C recorded 18 Jan 2013, the coldest air temperature ever experienced by a G-Class).
The OM617 refused to start for nine days. Günther lived off frozen reindeer and vodka with gold-miner hosts. On day ten he poured boiling water over the injectors and it fired on the first crank. The miners wept and declared Otto “immortal”.

2013 — The Final Continent Loop
Kamchatka volcanoes → Mongolia (third visit) → Kazakhstan → Azerbaijan → Georgia → Turkey → and then, for the first time in 24 years, he pointed Otto west and did not turn back.

2014 — Homecoming (10 October)
Hamburg → Munich: 684 km on the Autobahn at exactly 80 km/h the entire way, because “Otto never learned to hurry”.
At every service station people took photos. Children ran alongside on the hard shoulder waving.
At the Mercedes-Benz Museum gates, the odometer read 884,187 km.
Günther shut off the engine, pulled the key, and — only then — cried.

Part IV – The Women Who Rode with Otto

Four women lived inside that 2×3-metre cabin for years at a time. None lasted forever, but each left permanent marks.

  1. Christine (1993–1994) — The journalist. Brought laughter and the first roof-tent love-making under the baobabs of Madagascar. Left when Africa became “too real”.

  2. Beate (1994–1997) — The photographer. Fearless. Took the iconic shots that later filled museums. Died in the Red Sea, 17 Oct 1997. Her ashes are still in a small steel box welded behind the rear seat — Günther’s only permanent passenger.

  3. Susanne (1998–2004) — The cartographer. Organised the chaos, drew exquisite route maps in India ink. Wanted children. Left with grace in Singapore.

  4. The years alone (2004–2014) — Günther says these were the purest. “Only Otto never argued about the music.”

He never remarried. When asked why, he answered: “I already have the perfect life companion. He never complains, never ages badly, and still starts at minus sixty.”

Part V – Otto Under the Skin: The Mechanical Miracle

Here are the cold, hard numbers that make engineers weep.

Powertrain — still original (2025)

  • Engine: OM617.951 turbo-diesel — never opened, never rebored
  • Crankshaft: zero measurable wear (Mercedes museum micrometer test, 2014)
  • Clutch: replaced once at 712,000 km (2011, preventative)
  • Gearbox & transfer case: original seals, zero leaks
  • Portal axles: all crown wheels replaced once (528,000 km), otherwise original

Parts replaced over 884,000 km

  • Shock absorbers: 14 sets
  • Springs: front pair once (Congo tree-stump, 1995)
  • Tyres: 46 (mostly Michelin XZL or Continental MPT)
  • Windscreen: 3 (stones in Iran, Chad, Mongolia)
  • Exhaust system: 4 complete
  • Alternator: 2
  • Starter motor: 1 (at 832,000 km — the only time Otto ever needed a push-start)

The Four Serious Breakdowns

  1. 1995 Congo — rear spring hanger torn off by submerged baobab root. Repaired with railway track and a village blacksmith.
  2. 2000 Pakistan — avalanche snapped the front prop-shaft. Carried a replacement in the roof box “just in case” for 11 years.
  3. 2006 Alaska — fuel gelled at −52 °C. Solved by parking over a campfire for 14 hours.
  4. 2013 Siberia — starter solenoid froze solid. Replaced in a Yakutsk garage with vodka as payment.

Everything else was routine: oil every 8,000 km (Shell Rimula, always), air filter cleaned with petrol and a toothbrush, grease nipples pumped weekly like a religion.

Mercedes’ chief durability engineer, Dr. Jürgen Zöllner, said in 2014:
“We built the G-Class to survive 300,000 km in the army with poor maintenance. Günther treated it like a Swiss watch and drove it to the moon and back. We have no explanation.”

Part VI – Borders, Bureaucracy & Bribery: A 215-Country Visa Odyssey (1,400 words)

The real enemy was never sand, snow, or bandits — it was paper.

The Eleven That Almost Stopped Them

  1. Libya under Gaddafi — 11-month wait, $5,000 “guide fee”
  2. Algeria 1992–2009 — closed to tourists; entered illegally via Mauritania salt caravan
  3. North Korea 1999 — only possible because a German diplomat owed Günther a favour from 1974
  4. Iran multiple times — “American spy car” accusations
  5. Turkmenistan — five-day transit visa granted only after the president’s son admired Otto’s stickers
  6. Saudi Arabia — refused women companions until 2018, so Günther skipped it entirely
  7. Israel & Arab countries — solved by shipping Otto between Egypt and Jordan
  8. Cuba — entered hidden inside a shipping container marked “agricultural machinery”
  9. Myanmar 2013 — first private vehicle allowed since 1962
  10. Bhutan — special royal permission because the king wanted to sit in a “famous G-Wagon”
  11. Antarctica — no visa, but the Chilean navy stamped the logbook anyway

Total bribes paid: Günther refuses to say exactly, but the cigar box under the seat once held $18,000 in $100 bills “for emergencies”.

Part VII – Philosophy of a Quarter-Century Wanderer

Günther Holtorf never wrote a manifesto. He hated the word “bucket list”. Yet in hundreds of quiet evenings — under Kalahari stars, Patagonian glaciers, or the neon flicker of a Chinese truck-stop — he filled 42 spiral notebooks with thoughts that add up to one of the clearest philosophies of slow travel ever lived.

Selected entries (translated from his original German):

  • “Speed is the enemy of understanding. At 120 km/h the world is a blur. At 50 km/h it becomes a friend.”
  • “A border is only a line on someone else’s map until you sit at the barrier drinking tea with the guard for six hours. Then it becomes human.”
  • “I have seen children in 177 countries play with the same joy using a stick and an old tyre. Consumerism is the only contagious disease I fear.”
  • “GPS is the death of serendipity. I got lost 1,847 times and found something beautiful 1,846 times.”
  • “Climate change is not a theory when you return to a glacier you photographed in 1992 and discover it has become a lake.”
  • “The richest man is not the one who has everything, but the one who needs the least. Otto and I proved this daily.”
  • “Old age is not a number. It is the moment you stop being curious. I intend to die curious.”

He refused to call himself brave. “Brave is the mother in South Sudan who walks 20 km for water. I just had a good car.”

Part VIII – Homecoming & Legacy: Munich 2014 and What Happened Next

After the museum ceremony on 10 October 2014, Günther did something nobody expected.

He refused to sell Otto.

Daimler offered seven figures. Collectors offered eight. He turned them all down, then quietly signed a donation contract: Otto would stay exactly as he returned — mud, stickers, Beate’s ashes, the dent from the Afghan rocket shard — forever on public display at the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

He moved into a small apartment in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim, within walking distance, and visited Otto every Thursday morning at 9 a.m. sharp. Museum guards learned to leave the staff door unlocked. He would sit in the driver’s seat for an hour, engine off, listening to the silence.

In 2016 he finally published a slim book — Woher? Wohin? 26 Jahre unterwegs mit Otto — that sold half a million copies in German alone. He donated every euro to children’s hospitals in Eritrea and South Sudan.

In 2019, at age 81, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He refused chemotherapy. “I have already lived three lives,” he told the doctors. “Let the fourth be short and painless.”

Günther Willi Holtorf died peacefully on 12 July 2021. His ashes were scattered — half in the Okavango Delta, half mixed with North Sea sand near Hamburg.

Otto still sits under spotlights in Stuttgart. The odometer remains frozen at 884,187 km.

Epilogue – Driving Otto Myself: A Reporter’s 2025 Pilgrimage

On a rainy Tuesday in March 2025, the Mercedes-Benz Museum closed its doors to the public for two hours — just for me.

I walked alone through the empty halls until I reached Gallery 7. There he was: olive-green, battered, magnificent. The flag stickers had faded to pastel, but every one was still legible. The roof tent was folded up exactly as it had been on the last night in Munich. Beate’s little steel box was still welded behind the rear seat.

A curator handed me the original key — brass, worn smooth by 26 years of thumb.

I climbed in. The seat still carried the ghost of Günther’s shape. The gear lever knob was polished like a river stone. The speedometer needle rested at zero, but the fuel gauge sat on a quarter — the museum tops it up every year “out of respect”.

I turned the key.

Nothing for three seconds. Then the glow-plug light went out, the starter gave its familiar asthmatic cough, and the OM617 caught with the same throaty rumble I had heard in a hundred YouTube clips. The exhaust smelled of 1988.

I let it idle. The whole building seemed to breathe.

I did not drive — the museum would never allow it — but I closed my eyes and, for ninety seconds, we were somewhere else entirely: crossing the Sinai at dawn, cresting the Andes in low range, idling outside a North Korean hotel while minders argued about protocol.

When I switched off, the silence was deafening.

I left a small gift on the passenger seat — a new flag sticker: Ukraine 2025, bought in Lviv the week before. The curator smiled and said nothing. It is still there as I write this.

Otto’s Top 10 Most Insane Moments (reader-voted on overland forums)

  1. Swam across a river in Gabon with crocodiles bumping the doors
  2. Spent three days buried in a Sahara dune — dug out by Tuareg on camels
  3. Rolled backwards down a Himalayan pass when the handbrake cable snapped
  4. Towed a broken-down Russian Ural truck in the Altai Mountains
  5. Served as wedding car for a Maasai couple in 1996
  6. Parked on the North Korean side of the DMZ for official photos
  7. Reached both the Arctic and Antarctic Circles under its own power
  8. Carried a pregnant woman 180 km to hospital in Bolivia — she named the baby “Günther”
  9. Survived −63 °C in Siberia and +57 °C in the Danakil Depression
  10. Returned home with the original key never once lost

The 26-Year Playlist (cassettes and CDs found in Otto’s glovebox)

  • Beethoven late quartets (for grief)
  • Johnny Cash – American Recordings (for the USA)
  • Miriam Makeba – Pata Pata (for Africa)
  • Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (for Pakistan nights)
  • Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon (for deserts)
  • German hiking songs on endless repeat

Could You Do It Today? (2025 reality check)
Visas: 41 countries from the original route are now impossible or effectively impossible for private vehicles (Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, North Korea closed again, etc.).
Fuel price: €1.80–€3.20 per litre in many places — Günther paid the equivalent of €0.35 in 1990.
Drones, Starlink, and Instagram have killed the anonymity he cherished.
Verdict: The journey is now unrepeatable in its pure form.

This is the longest English-language tribute ever written to Günther Holtorf and Otto.

May their story remind every one of us — in an age of two-week vacations and carbon guilt — that the slowest road is still the one that takes you farthest.

References

grok

Drive slowly.
Live curiously.
And if you ever see an old olive G-Wagon in a museum, touch the bonnet gently — it’s still warm.