Car She Learned To Drive In and First Car Bought
Tiegs was born in Minnesota, but her family moved to Alhambra, California, when she was five. Her dad taught her how to drive in a manual 1961 Austin-Healy.
"My dad bought me my first car, the Austin-Healy. He said, " Are you sure you want this car?" It was a used, a convertible, and it was burgundy. It was a very sexy car. And it was so hot in many ways; it attracted so many guys. For some reason around the foot pedals, it got hot and there was nothing you could do about it."
But when she went to college, the Austin-Healy wasn't practical because she wanted to be able to drive all her friends around. So Tiegs, who had just started modeling, bought herself a new manual dark-blue Volkswagen Beetle with a beige interior. "I loved it. I absolutely loved it," she recalls. "I loved the smell of it. I loved the look of it."
But six months later the car met its fate. "I woke up one morning, looked outside, and my car was gone," she says, still with a sigh of regret. "It was stolen." That day, she bought a replacement -- a new manual 1965 Mercedes-Benz 230SL coupe with a hardtop -- for $4,000. "I drove it off the showroom floor and I kept that car for 25 years," she says, proudly.
Favorite Road Trip
Although Tiegs was a jet-setter for her job as a model, she likes driving and has driven up the California coast to Seattle. "I love road trips," Tiegs says, emphasizing the word, with a hint of wanderlust.
Each year, she would drive to Las Vegas with her son for his birthday. "I would pick my son up from school at 3:30, and by the time we got into the Mohave desert, the sun would be setting and there'd be stripes of pink and blue. I'll never forget those times with him. He wanted to go to Las Vegas, so we always liked that road trip."
But more recently, Tiegs, her mother, and sister took a more reflective road trip from Santa Maria, California, back to their roots in Minnesota, after her dad passed away in July. He was flown back to Minnesota, giving them three days to drive there for the funeral.
"It gave us space from the time of his death to the time we were going to bury him. We were together as family," she says. "We went through California, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Utah. It was fascinating, all the different states, the different scenery. It was an amazing trip. It gave us a wonderful distance from Dad's death to the time we were burying him. And then we buried him in the cornfields of Minnesota. It was just beautiful."