I don’t remember exactly when we started watching Top Gear. It was somewhere between 2008 and 2011, I know that much. I also know that our dear friends, Meg and Jason, were the ones who first brought it to our attention. When they asked us if we watched the show, my first thought was, “A show about cars? Boring!”

But we like our friends rather a lot, and we knew they liked a lot of the same things as we did, and so we decided to watch an episode, if only so we could say we had given it a shot.

I did not expect to enjoy it.

I definitely never expected to fall in love.

But I did. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May proved that if you are entertaining enough, the subject matter really doesn’t matter. Those three could do a show about luggage, and it would be hysterical.

Now, this is nowhere near my normal “brand” genre. And no, I am not recommending this show as anything family-friendly. There is a fair bit of swearing, and all three of the hosts have a fairly crude sense of humor at times.

So why am I talking about it here on my blog today? Well, for a couple of reasons:

First, I just can’t stay in a box, okay? I mean, if you’ve read The Turrim Archive at all, you already know that. This is not a surprise. I like a wide variety of things. Always have.
Second, because… believe it or not… Top Gear/Grand Tour taught me rather a lot about how to write a good story.

When we started watching this show, I was just getting serious about publishing. I had sort of published two of my books before then, but 2012 is the year that I really point to as the beginning of this authoring career of mine. That’s the year I started publishing. That was the year I re-released my first book with a new title, new cover, all-new editing, and really set my feet down the path of being a professional, self-published author.

But I was still just getting started.

Despite having like 12 fans and only making a whopping $97 on book sales that first year… something about Top Gear inspired me not to give up. Honestly, for many years, it was one of my crazy, never-gonna-happen daydreams to get popular enough as an author to be asked to be a “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” guest. The Top Gear Guys (as Derek and I lovingly refer to them) gave me a super high bar to shoot for.

Of course, that never happened. Thirteen years later, I am still nowhere near popular enough as an author to be asked to be on that kind of show. And in the intervening years, the Top Gear Guys got kicked off their own show and had to start over with Amazon in a new (practically identical) show called The Grand Tour. Most likely due to copyright issues, the new show did not have this feature of inviting a star to come race around their racetrack any longer, and I can’t even express to you how sad I was at that point to discover that no matter how popular I got in the future, I would never get to be the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car.

But it was a fun dream while it lasted.

Watching Top Gear and all its ridiculousness mixed into random facts about cars I would never buy and will never experience driving kept me laughing through some hard times in my life. Derek and I watched rather a lot of episodes in the hospital together after our second daughter was born. They kept us sane through many long days and nights of newborns and sleep training. We enjoyed watching them drive fast, pepper us with entertaining facts about cars, crash things, set things on fire, and just generally be amusing. They delighted us when they showed up in that one Phineas and Ferb episode, and they provided fun insights on the motoring industry in general. They allowed me to join in on conversations about cars I never would have been able to before… yes, incredibly, they actually taught me something amidst all the laughter.

Of course, my favorite episodes have always been the ones with challenges, especially the BIG challenges that sent the guys motoring across the world. My absolute favorite episode is the one where they race to the North Pole (Jeremy and James in a tricked-out-specially-for-the-trip Toyota pickup truck, while Richard took a dog sled team).

These “challenge” episodes are my favorites because these are the ones that feel the most like stories. These are the episodes that have the most in common with the fantasy adventures I love so well. But Clarkson, Hammond, and May allowed me to travel with them to so many amazing places I will probably never go, and introduced me to several places I never knew I wanted to go but would totally jump at the chance to get to see in real life now that I’ve had a glimpse of how beautiful and interesting those places are.

And because of these real-life adventures I got to follow along with from the comfort of my living room, and despite the fact that a reality car-show is about as opposite from the fantasy genre as you can get, I have to admit that Jeremy, Richard, and James all had a hand in helping some of my stories come to life. Because they did manage to do some very epic things in their various challenges. They travelled to some amazing places and through their show, and they took me along with them.

Several locations in the Turrim Archive are directly inspired by places I got to see and “experience” because of the Top Gear Guys.

But, all good things must come to an end.

A few weeks ago, the very final episode of Grand Tour released.

The guys took us to Zimbabwe, which is absolutely incredible in terms of landscape… breathtaking and astonishing.

But they didn’t stop there. Because upon reaching the other side of Zimbabwe, they took us back to the location of their very first feature-length special, crossing back through Botswana and the Makadikadi Salt Flats (I mean, if that’s not a fantasy name for a location, I don’t know what is).

And in this final farewell, they taught me one last lesson: that of how to write a satisfying end. By choosing to stop now, before they get far too old to meet the physical demands of the show, by gracefully bowing out, by writing an episode that allowed them to “come full circle” and leave us where we found them back at the very beginning…

Well.

I didn’t think I’d even like watching a car show.

I definitely never expected it to make me cry.

“I never dreamed it would grow into a career and life defining adventure and occasionally nearly life and career ending adventure. I can't pretend it isn't going to be a wrench ending this, because it is.” ~Richard Hammond
"We have travelled thousands and thousands of miles and had thousands and thousands of adventures. It just remains for me to say thank you very much for watching. It means a lot." ~Jeremy Clarkson
"Anyway, I hope it brought you a little bit of happiness." ~James May

It did.

It very much did.

Thank you for the fun, for the adventure, for the explosions, for the laughter, and for the lessons in how to write a good story with a satisfying end.

A Fond Farewell