An automotive celebrity rolled through Richmond last week.
Stopping off for a few days in her around-the-world journey in a 1930 Hudson sedan was 78-year-old Heidi Hetzer. The Berlin resident who is a former rally car driver, Opel (GM) dealership owner, and all-round auto enthusiast has been on the road for nearly a year — she started in her hometown last Aug. 31.
So far she has logged close to 50,000 km winding her way across Europe, most of Asia, and across to Australia and New Zealand. About a week ago, she made landfall in North America when her blue, vintage auto was shipped to Los Angeles to begin the section of the tour up the west coast from California.
The journey is following in the tire tracks of another German auto adventurer — Clärenore Stinnes — who from 1927 to 1929 was the first woman to cross the globe by automobile. The feat in her Adler Standard 6 was in part to prove Germany made the best cars in the world.
For Hetzler, who spent the previous 20 years rally driving her fleet of 16 vintage cars across the globe, it was also a way for her to remain busy in her retirement.
“All my life I was an auto dealer. And my children said to me, ‘Mamma, what are you going to do if you don’t work?’” Hetzer said from her temporary digs in Richmond last Thursday. “No one wanted to take over the Opel dealership after my 45 years in the business, so I decided to sell the business and be like the first German woman to drive around the world. The trouble is Clärenore Stinnes was in her 20s when she did it. I am a little bit older.”
Age doesn’t seem to have deterred Hetzer in the least as she travels from town to town, often without a scripted plan of where to stop and sleep for the night — something that has had her bed down in the back of her Hudson on occasion when there hasn’t been an available hotel room or generous local to put her up.
“I go wherever the wind blows me sometimes, or wherever the Hudson decides to break down,” she said with a laugh.
Her host for the Richmond stay was Neenu Mansahia.
“She’s pretty amazing,” Mansahia said of her guest. “And she’s pretty well known, it seems. There’s someone right now, a fan I think, talking to her outside my house.”
Hetzer has a blog (heidi-around-the-world.com) she updates with notes on her progress, as well as a map of her excursion so far.
After Richmond, Hetzer said she planned to head eastward across Canada, and dipping south into the U.S. through the midwest, then taking in Detroit, Niagra Falls and eventually Florida.
“Then that’s where a big decision will have to be made,” Hetzer said. “People have told me not to go to Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras — countries like that which may be unsafe.
“Maybe I’ll go. I don’t know. But I do plan on stopping in Cuba and then heading south to Peru. All I know is I want to see all five continents.”
Parts of Africa were scratched from the itinerary early on because her Hudson is just a two-wheel drive and some of the roadways Hetzer expected to encounter there would have been too difficult to travel.
Whatever route she decides on, Hetzer said she hopes to wrap up her global adventure with a return to Berlin in time for her 79th birthday next June 20.
“People have been very kind,” Hetzer said. “They have been unbelievable, helping me out.”
