Gear Patrol | Spirit of Adventure, Passion for Gear

Fire and Nice

The season for fire building is something we’re all trying to forget now, but planning ahead never hurts. This striking wall installation is actually composed of a free-standing steel structure that can contain either a gas or wood burning fire pit on the left hand side. A 37-inch Lowe LCD sits encased in an insulated [...]

It's finally okay to drive one

Good news, men. You’ll no longer be emasculated driving a VW Beetle. Lower, wider and with just the right amount of aggressiveness, the 2012 Volkswagen Beetle is completely redesigned so you won’t have to look like you borrowed your girlfriend’s car. Though we can’t say it’s rakish and intimidating, we do agree that it’s clearly [...]

A Lesson on Improvisation

Miles Davis and John Coltrane are those guys with the Blue albums. Cannoball Adderly — now wasn’t he a famous dare devil? If this sounds like your internal monologue on the subject of Jazz, then we strongly suggest reading Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology ($100). Like the college course you should have picked over econ, minus [...]

This cat purrs

Just posting all you gentlemen a reminder that this weekend is your last chance to enter the Mizuno JPX-800 Irons giveaway package (over a $1,000 worth of gear, in case you were wondering). Get all the details on how to enter here.

The Room with the Golden View

Located in Oracabessa, on the north coast of Jamaica, the GoldenEye Resort isn’t a kitschy hommage to the classic game where you can play real-life scenarios of pistols, license to kill, in the Complex — not that we wouldn’t love that. But it does, however, have James Bond lineage. Once home to Ian Fleming, where [...]

Bellissima!

So Lamborghini and Ferrari have the market on Italian exotic cars. Perhaps there’s room for another. The Spada Codatronca Monza (no, it’s not a tomato based pasta dish) actually has some serious Italian blood coursing through its veins. Ercole Espada was once chief stylist for Zagato, a design house that needs no introduction. He moved [...]

Black is back

The definition of a wildcase is a crime too savage and inexplicable to be easily categorized by the FBI. And in the case of Neil Russell’s Wildcase, a small town retired cop and his wife have been brutally murdered. The deceased happen to be friends of Rail Black, and if we learned anything from Neil [...]

No Light? No Problem.

Let’s be clear. The Midnight Shot NV-1 Night Vision Camera ($130) is a fun gimmick. Its 1/2.5″ CMOS 5.0 megapixel camera is nothing to get excited over, but when paired with the built-in infrared flash, it can take shots in complete darkness. Infrared light also has the nifty ability to view through certain materials like [...]

Taking the Tool Watch Fetish to New Heights

As Rolex moves further away from its tool watch roots with bigger, shinier version of its classics, there are still those in the watch community who are carrying forward the legacy that began in the 1950s with the Explorer and Submariner. A couple of years ago, a Dutch Rolex collector, Philipp Stahl, created a modified [...]

Next of Gin

Stemming from the address of the wine and spirit store on St. James’s Street, where the business has been located since 1698, No.3 London Dry Gin ($50) is a new gin from Berry Bros. & Rudd. While the recipe is proprietary (not unexpected), it includes the traditional ingredients: Juniper, orange and grapefruit peel, angelica root, [...]

Maximum Mini

If you’ve ever seen WRC (Word Rally Championship), you know that the drivers and cars are some of the best around. You also know that you must be at least mildly wrong in the head to drive that fast on some seriously uneven and unpredictable roads around the world. Well, the sport has been suffering [...]

Well-tailored rights

Inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of tailored clothing. Thankfully, there are an ever-growing legion of off-the-rack fighters who hold the self-evident truths. Admittedly, former Wall Street warriors and co-founders Hil Davis and Veeral Rathod aren’t exactly the founding fathers of affordable tailored clothing, but using savvy business practices, fabrics sourced from the same [...]

You say you want a Swivelution

Garage storage solutions haven’t evolved much in the last 50 years, and that frustrated the Penner family, who has operated a manufacturing company since 1981. The tool boxes in their workshops just weren’t passing muster, so they decided to build their own. Instead of falling back to standard drawer design which they saw could be [...]

9,000 miles away, a paradise of adventure

Editor’s Note: Gear Patrol Correspondent Jason Heaton was dispatched 9,000 miles from Minneapolis to Sri Lanka with the goal of chasing down as much adventure in three weeks as possible. As you’ll read below, he didn’t disappoint. On a dusk drive looking for elephants, we happened upon an old goat herder on the roadside, his [...]