Sunday afternoon, I mounted my new $25 dash cam (purchased 2 of them from Amazon, $25 each to my door, I figured why not!) inside the windshield of my 2002 BMW ///M3 Convertible, and drove from Santa Cruz to San Jose (SJC airport) California.

Highway 17, has earned this dubious distinction as the most dangerous highway in California. With it’s steep decent from it’s 1800′ Santa Cruz Mountains summit to the Santa Clara Valley Floor below, it’s often this site of injury and fatality crashes.

Audio in the clip is horrible, and unedited. Wind noise due to the top on car being down, plus the fact I was wasting no time on “The Hill“.

While growing up in “The Valley”, heading over the hill to Santa Cruz always seemed like such a journey. Families would pack up food and drink to make it over the mountain. In reality, it’s a fairly short dive (about 20 miles) but back in the 70’s when I grew up, summer time temps well into the 90’s, combined with the fairly steep ascent to the summit (at 1800′) meant there was a pretty good chance you’d be taking a break in one of the turnouts while the car’s radiator cooled off enough to continue the drive. Using A/C on the hill was basically an impossibility, unless you enjoyed being temporarily stranded on the side of the highway while possibly awaiting a tow hook.

As I grew older, cars were built better, and I was able to afford these better cars, the drive to the beach became less and less an practice of gambling upon one’s luck, and simply being able to afford a 1/2 tank of gas on a high school or college student’s budget.