Perhaps surprisingly, something I rarely do is drive for the sake of driving. And that’s wrong.

When I have the Focus out, chances are it’s to go to a meet, a show, to visit friends at a shop, go photograph something; you get the idea. Granted, a normal season has so much going on that I’m still behind the wheel many nights anyway and rarely feel like I didn’t drive the car enough, but given there will be a lot more free evenings this year I decided I should try to take advantage of some of them by just picking a road and heading down it. Alberta really is a beautiful province and despite living here my entire life, there are many small towns and other areas I’ve never been to.

Now to be totally honest, even this outing was initiated by another reason – I had to run to Airdrie to pick up a car part (a rare Tuscany red door panel for the Mk3 parts collection, if you were curious) – so this isn’t a true practice of the driving-for-the-sake-of-driving concept. Let’s count it as the “tester” for it? After my stop I decided to point the car down one of the little roads leaving Airdrie and see where it took me. I had my camera on hand and took a quick photo here and there, though I ended up mostly just driving around for a while and eventually re-entered Calgary after many kilometers of open country roads.

There’s a lot for me to explore, and there will be a lot of evenings and weekends that would otherwise be filled with events now left wide open. Let’s see what’s out there.

-Bill