I taught my older son to drive the same way my father taught me, with equal doses of caution and paranoia. Sometimes, riding shotgun on the interstate, I would spy the speedometer creeping above the limit and hear my dad’s words tumbling out.
“Hey, pal,” I would say to Max. “How fast are you going?”
I found myself recalling one of those moments this summer, behind the wheel of a black BMW. My son sat next to me, watching with glee as we hit 125 miles per hour.
“Nice!” he said.
Max was 18 at the time. He had finished his freshman year in college and arrived in Berlin that afternoon for a couple summer months. Storms had delayed his overnight flight from J.F.K. When I collected him from the airport, he was tired. I was deflated.
As happens when children grow up — and especially when you move a continent away from them — we had missed Father’s Day together. For a belated celebration, my wife had given us tickets to see our favorite band, Wilco, play a rare show in Germany.
When he slid into the car, the band was set to take the stage in Dortmund, on the other side of the country, in less than three hours. Google Maps said the drive would take five.
We could abandon the show. Or we could unlearn some fatherly lessons, at least for a day, and press our luck on the autobahn.
They tell you highway driving is different in Germany, where for long stretches there are no speed limits. Up until that point, I hadn’t really noticed. In my first months in Berlin, I mostly shuttled between the airport, source interviews and, occasionally, IKEA.
I had a German driver’s license but had not lost my aversion to high speeds. I could still hear my dad, eyeing other cars, reminding me, “They’re out to get you.”
Once on a cross-country road trip, when I was just a couple years older than Max is now, I refused to crack 70 m.p.h. on a freeway in Texas. My college friends relieved me of the keys.
This was different. This was desperate. On the autobahn, I told myself I would drive as fast as traffic, safety and German engineering would allow.
The autobahn is psychologically important to many Germans, and the center of a heated political debate today. Flush with 500 billion euros (nearly $600 billion) in new infrastructure funding, officials are fighting over how much to spend to repair and expand roadways — at a time when the country must also rebuild its once-proud rail system. (We checked trains to Dortmund; none would have delivered us to the show in time.)
On the road, German drivers ooze expertise, their Volkswagens and Porsches breezing past in the left lane even as I cleared 100 m.p.h.
It helped, weirdly, that the speedometer showed kilometers. The higher numbers somehow felt less real, less scary.
It especially helped to be with Max, who managed the music. He caught me up on things you miss in phone-call reports from college.
We blew past windmills and practiced our German. We watched the Google estimate shrink steadily. We started to hope we might catch the second set of the concert.
When the time was right, we called my dad.
“We just hit 200 kilometers an hour,” I said, triumphantly. “That’s 125 in miles!”
To my father’s credit, he laughed.
We made it to Dortmund in just over 3 hours, 20 minutes, parking a block away from the tiny outdoor venue. We’d only missed a half-dozen songs. We patted each other on the back.
Max sang loudly along with Jeff Tweedy and the band. “I can’t believe it,” we kept saying to each other. At one point, he turned to me, smiled, and said, “This is awesome.”
Wilco had been his first rock show, at the Anthem in Washington. We later saw them play deep into the night at Wolf Trap in Virginia, along with Max’s stepmother and little sister. Max loves to rank concerts, albums, you name it. We weren’t sure where this show rated, but we agreed it was the hardest we’d ever worked to see one.
We were rewarded with my favorite rendition, ever, of one of our favorite Wilco songs, which includes a long and face-melting guitar solo.
It’s called “Impossible Germany.”
After the show ended at 10 p.m., we ate a quick dinner then hit the road again. We drove slower going east. As we approached Berlin, the first fingers of dawn broke through. I was flooded with gratitude.
For students, college is a time of growth and discovery. For a parent, it also brings a new fear: that you might not discover new things with your children, together, anymore.
The autobahn drove those fears away.
Our summer flew by like a Porsche in the left lane. Early in September, our whole family filled the car to drive Max to the airport, for his return to school. We left early, but I drove well under the limit.
Some trips, you don’t want to rush.
Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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