(Editor’s note: When this Petrolicious video came out last May, the story of Heidi Hetzer and her 1930 Hudson Great Eight made a deep impact on me. I adore driving…I’m probably at my best when I’m behind the wheel. I’ve known this since childhood, I’ve had friends back up that thought after seeing me in action. But Heidi did something I’ve only dreamed of doing, a world tour, in a car that is well-aged and would be nearly impossible to keep up with if it wasn’t in excellent mechanical health. In 2014, after retiring from a long and prosperous career, Heidi and her Hudson, inspired by Clärenore Stinnes, went on a tour of the world. Even with a cancer scare during the trip that required her to return home to Germany for treatment, she was undeterred and made sure to complete every last mile she intended on driving. Sadly, Hetzer passed on April 21st, 2019, but what a life lived. -McTaggart)

The road and you. I find something so deeply relaxing about finding a nice stretch of asphalt and letting the car find it’s way around. It doesn’t matter if I’m just cruising around the local area or roaming the country, a road trip is a road trip, with numerous options for sights to see, people to meet and things to learn about along the way. I’ve put in hundreds of thousands of miles over my driving years, many of them on aimless trips that simply saw me roaming for the sake of roaming, but I’ve almost always done them in a modern vehicle and at my last check, the longest trip I’ve ever taken in one shot rang out to 6,029 miles, when I took a month off from the Army and roamed the western two-thirds of the United States to clear my head post-deployment.

Heidi Hetzer has me beaten hands-down twice over. Not only has she roamed the entire planet, she did so in this 1930 Hudson Great Eight. I lived in the lap of luxury, with air conditioning, music, shade, heat, and so on and so forth. She did it in a car that is older than my next living relative by at least ten years, a car that still has wooden-spoke wheels, a car that I promise you will have to go through hell and back to get parts for.

This lady is my hero.

Be sure to click on the close-captioning on the video to get the English translations. It’s worth it.