Roamers – Ep 03 | That Time That …

11 June 2022 Redazione Lifestyle, News

ROAMERS – Cars Stories

That Time That …

Words by Andrea Balti / Photo by S. Lomax

When they asked me to tell one of my favorite automotive stories, I wondered how the hell I was ever going to pick just one. Also because when I finally decided which to tell, others would come to mind and who knows how they end up in a secondary compartment of my memory. I like to think of memories as files, neatly stowed in a large room full of drawers. You know, those sliding filing cabinets with block letters in plain sight that in every movie allow you to find immediately what you are looking for, even if you have no idea what it is? Right, that’s it.

I then walk into my private room of memories and so many names, places and cars immediately remind me of the amount of stories I could put together for this piece, but something tells me that I have not yet reached the right shelf, the story you would like to hear and that more than any other maybe represents a precise moment in which everything has changed. Here it is, now everything becomes clearer. The right words were enough, the perfect moment and almost as if by magic, the drawer opens by itself, making everything around me indistinct and launching me to where it all began, where my life has changed. A moment of a day like many others for some, but that in a precise and incalculable second has definitively changed my life, transforming a dream into reality and a moment into something to last forever.

That time the spark fired is still bright and clear in my mind. It was a Thursday and even though it all began a couple of days earlier, after long weeks of phone calls and a wait that, besides seeming interminable, almost started convincing me that it would all end in a handful of nothing, a simple email officially invited me for a day that I had long idealized. Finally, I was about to connect the dots of my greatest passions: travel and cars, of course. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep at night and that the following morning, my eyes were already wide open well before dawn, with adrenaline rushing and the desire to get involved in that world that I was sure would remain a dream, something impossible to realize. Instead, after a couple of hours, I am together with those traveling companions who have then become colleagues, friends, family.

After years you might think that the thrill that rises up your spine the night before a road trip has slowly faded, yet it is always there to remind how lucky I am to scout the places that will serve as locations for the shootings and for ours (and yours) driving tour. The same roads you have long idealized and on which you have fantasized are the ultimate playground shaping a vision that with the passage of time teaches you that we must never set limits, because barriers are only in our heads. Where there is a road, a new adventure begins, each time it is different, each time it is something incredibly magical.

That time, the first of so many times that I have crossed the Col de la Bonette, I experienced something that I thought was unrepeatable. A shiver that rises along the spine and tingles like the early autumn breeze, where you know that suddenly everything can change and make that idyllic moment of automotive nirvana abruptly come to an end. It is in that moment that you are frantically trying to capture all those colors, those smells and that unnatural silence of a mountain pass ready for winter hibernation, almost disconsolate due to the fact that you will never experience a sensation like this again. It is as if the magic runs out. Yet, that time I thought it was destined to remain unparalleled, it was back again not even ten months later, on the same road, with the same crazy company, reminding me how this job is not only the most beautiful in the world, but the only one capable of make my legs shake with excitement the morning before a more special day at the office than usual.