Today in, “As seen on Craigslist”
Runs and drives, body and glass ok except crack in windshield tires good. Bill of sale, no title, last registered in 1999. Not sure what year it is.
Which is a shame because it would be perfect.
Huh… that seems suspiciously good. Like, “Free Offroad Recovery” is code for “Secret Murder Club.”
Charlie. Looking at an offroad recovery (rescue) group I found on Craigslist.
More Window Shopping
Last time this was simple. Evan wanted an exotic convertible. I had my heart set on a truck. And George bought the first Volkswagen he laid his eyes on.
This time, we have an unavoidable competition. We know we need four wheel drive, a high clearance, and something that fits in the budget restriction. So that narrows the field. And we all want the same thing. Basically this:
(If I’m honest, perhaps less this specific vehicle than the assurance of a vehicle that could do this without needing to call in a tow truck.)
I dream of a Wrangler. There’s just something strikingly whimsical about a car with no doors.
A soft-top Wrangler would make me incredibly happy, but they’re built to last so availability is low and prices are high. And if there is one, we’ll all be clamoring for it.
Or if not a Jeep, we all swooned at this option:
Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Izuzu, and Geo all made very acceptable little toy off-roaders in the 80s and 90s. Creature comforts are few, but they’re reliable, cheap, lightweight, and combine sufficiently high clearance with a short wheelbase.
We have seen a number of agreeable rides, but again, each seems to come with a few caveats:
About which the seller offered: “It’s a clean title nephew got dui vehicle was impounded I bought it back from the tow yard for him and now he will be in jail for quite sometime so I’m selling it to get back a portion of the money he owns me. It’s a nice vehicle.” It’s that last bit that really sells it.
George does seem to be on a Montero kick, here’s another he found that shows modest promise: “Runs great fog lights are bent only one works because ex crashed into a pole, there is a t.v but doesn’t work and no stereo. Small leak in rear differential and car makes noise when heater is on.”
“It ran when it was parked about 10 years ago.”
Or there’s the classic option! George and Evan both are excited when they see Nissan Hardbody trucks. So am I, but if I bought a second one I know I’d never hear the end of it. But in true D21 fashion, this is one of the more mechanically promising options.
What am I going to wind up with?? How did you people DO this last time? I think at this point last trip, I was already negotiating for the Bumblebee.
George. 23 days to departure.
Going Overland
Our first roadtrip adventure took us up the Pacific Coast on The Pacific Coast Highway and US 101, a glorious ribbon of coastal pavement that weaves up nearly two thousand miles of rocky shoreline. No highway will ever be as precious to us as that was, so we’ve decided that our next roadtrip should simply avoid them.
How hard could it be?
For this adventure, we’ll set out from Sacramento, headed for Salt Lake City by way of Las Vegas. We will pass by Lake Tahoe, Yosemite National Park, Death Valley, Lake Mead, Valley of Fire State Park, the north rim of the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and Capitol Reef.
The route we’ve planned prioritizes BLM (Bureau of Land Management), Forest Service, and park service roads which are largely unpaved or listed as “primitive.” Further, Yosemite will likely still be covered in snow with its primary pass road closed, Death Valley is largely unpaved, and the roads into the northwestern part of the Grand Canyon are described by a Park Service website that could be summarized simply as, “please don’t try to drive here.”
So we’re thinking off-road capable vehicles for this undertaking. Bumbles, the Alfa, and the Pickup will have to stay behind.
Naturally, we’ll be doing another Top Gear-inspired “Cheap Car Challenge” to find the perfect companions for our antics: buy used cars over the Internet for a pittance, drive them over a long distance (meandering routes preferred) while being hilariously abusive to each other, and competing to see who got the best deal (measured largely on strength of personality).
The second Great Roadtrip begins the evening of Friday, May 12th. Yet again, I’ll be documenting the whole journey here. We’re excited to have you along for the ride.
The Sequel
At the end of the roadtrip, reflecting upon our absurd yet triumphant quest to travel the entire Pacific Coast in Craigslist-sourced cars, George put it best:
At first, we thought we’d be be crazy to try this. But somewhere along the way, we realized we’d be crazy not to do it again.
After refusing to abandon our cherished rides where we should have in Seattle, (which, out of bewildered embarrassment, I neglected to mention in this blog) we had plenty of work on them to keep us entertained. We’ve spent the past year and half fixing Bumbles, uncovering the true nature of the Alfa’s quirks, and rocketing around in the still-not-broken Pickup back at home. We even had a reunion last fall in Oklahoma:
But time has come to get back on the road.
Travelogue 2015: The Pacific Coast Roadtrip
I’d promised to write a book of our adventures when I got back. How hard could it be? As it turns out, you lovely lot who had so energetically followed our adventures made do with a very distracted narrator. Whose writing required an arduous editing process… Also, I procrastinate. But just in time for the holidays (well, the second year’s worth of holidays, anyway), I published Travelogue 2015: The Pacific Coast Roadtrip.
Thank you all for coming along for the ride with us last year. If you’d like a copy of the book PDF, reach out to one of us and we’ll get it to you.
Disbanded
I dropped George and Evan at SeaTac this morning, so it’s just me and the aggravating Rental Chariot. I’ve got a lot to do to get ready for the European segment and being back at work, so I took a pretty easy day.
After the airport, I drove up to the Seattle Center area and walked around the grounds under the iconic Space Needle, and then went through the EMP Museum.
I immediately lost myself in the Star Wars and the Power of Costume exhibit. They have sixty to seventy original movie costumes from the original trilogy as well as the prequel trilogy. In my theatrical experience, the department I know the least about is costuming, so I’m always excited to hear about why an artist made the choices he or she made when designing and building them. This was fascinating from an art history perspective.
The prequel trilogy’s Padmé Amidala’s costuming drew influences from everything from Victorian-era European aristocracy and Malaysian royalty to African tribal dressings, and much of the development of her character is revealed or supported by her clothing. This stands in stark contrast to the female lead of the original trilogy, Princess Leia, whose costuming was generally very modest and subtle, drawing from a much more traditional view of portraying purity through dress. (Which, of course, heightens the shock and reinforces her humiliation of being forced to wear the slave bikini in the following movie, itself nearly as iconic a costume as the Darth Vader helmet.)
Costuming for the gentlemen in the series was just as ornately concepted. And there were also great writeups on other favorite characters.
Then I chuckled my way through What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones. There, I found the perfect location to continue the trip’s deeply embarassing selfie tradition, but it’s lonelier without the boys.
I wandered a bit more before heading back to the hotel. It’s the first time this trip that I’ve actually stayed in a real hotel. Everything for the roadtrip was either an old-fashioned highway-side motel, AirBnB, or hosted by a friend. Being in a hotel feels a bit boring, but I will admit, hotels have this figured out pretty well, and it’s a good place for me to get things done while I get ready for the next segment.
My “big sister” Alex Wright made me promise that I’d go to Thai Tom on the Ave for dinner one night in Seattle. So decided to I pick up some takeout from there for dinner tonight so I could at least have some good food while I resigned myself to the idea that work was a thing I have to start doing again. It was glorious.
This place put me on a half-hour wait just to take out a single order of pad see ew (I should point out, there was no description of what anything was on the menu; I picked this because I’ve had it elsewhere). The whole restaurant is probably smaller than my apartment, and is set up like a bar. There’s a small Asian man (standing, center) who runs between that station, all the tables, and the crowd standing outside, scribbling on a tiny Guest Check pad all kinds of notes about waitlists, orders, and who knows what else, as well as delivering the takeout, taking payments, and making change. Be advised: this man stands between you and some pretty fantastic food, so it behooves you to try and flag him down as he makes a pass. He may or may not come to you.
While I waited, I wandered around “the Ave” which is University of Washington’s answer to the Drag (Guadalupe Street along the West Mall of the University of Texas).
Back at the hotel, I feasted, did paperwork, and repacked a few things in preparation for tomorrow’s office day. The first day back… I’m scared.
It’s been almost a week in the Pacific Northwest and today is the first day it isn’t brilliantly sunny.
In Order of Appearance
With the roadtrip behind us, carried across the finish line by three vehicles nearly as old as their drivers, a spotlight on each:
George’s 1991 Volkswagon Cabriolet. “The Bumblebee.”
Purchased sight-unseen two weeks prior to departure on August 13th, brokered by “Aunt” Heidi, and repaired at Nyseco Motors in Santa Ana, California.
The Bumblebee was the only four-seater among us, although the back seats have no seatbelts. It also lacks a working radio, the A/C option was installed but it is broken, the driver and passenger seatbelts work but do not retract, the horn and reverse lights work only intermittently, the washer fluid pump doesn’t work, the cardboard shroud for the radiator has dissolved, the power steering pump makes strange noises at extreme angles, and the soft-top is covered in mold. The mighty Bumblebee caused more delays than the other vehicles because of its starter solenoid, which sits right below the exhaust manifold, preventing a hot-restart. George replaced the starter in LA and installed a solenoid fix kit in Indianola. Aside from non-starts, he was only stuck once at Balboa Park in San Diego when the key could not be removed from the driver door, which he had to take apart and fix on the side of the road.
But as we climbed through Big Sur along the Pacific Coast Highway, George stopped feeling like he was driving someone else’s car and became one with his mighty Bumblebee. He also earns points for most significant repair work, with the starter replacement.
Evan’s 1987 Alfa Romeo Spider, Graduate Edition.
Purchased August 28th at Calstate OC Auto in Santa Ana, California, a “buy here pay here” kind of dealer who was creatively deceptive on the paperwork.
The Alfa features a broken speedometer, uselessly slow wipers, catastrophically poorly focused headlights, and a busted lock in the passenger door. En route, Evan was able to fix the locking mechanism in the door, and realign the headlights. The only holdup it caused was when stress fractures in the key (caused by the door) caused the key to stick in the ignition. After tracking down a locksmith who actually had a blank to fit the Alfa, he got a new key cut to avoid that issue.
Evan struggled to find the ideal setting for the Alfa until cruising up the boulevard of expensive little beach towns along Highway 1 into Los Angeles, and that’s when, as he put it, the Alfa started to make sense to him. But it wasn’t until the vineyard drive into Paso Robles that he realized, “Oh dear, I think I love this car.”
Taylor’s 1988 Nissan D21 Pickup.
Purchased August 29th in the loading dock of Escondido Resource Recovery, a waste and recycling disposal center, brokered by two aids: the previous owner’s brother who translated and Evan who knew how to drive a standard.
The Pickup has no working instrumentation (save maybe the gas gauge that might be semi-accurate), mileage is at least 350,000 but the odometer was rolled back and disconnected, the blower’s diverter doesn’t work, there are no vent covers anywhere, the dome light shorts, the toolbox lock is busted, the headlights are poorly aligned, there are tears in the cab’s vinyl headliner, and for two solid days the radio was stuck loudly tuned to a Mexican pop radio station. The truck never truly broke down, although it did spend three days struggling to start, running rich, and billowing smoke on a cold start with its SES light on. But that mysteriously mended itself after San Francisco. The working theory is a faulty sensor sent a bad reading and triggered a failsafe condition — but that seems awfully fancy for such a base configuration. The only holdups the pickup can be blamed for were occasional stalls, caused by its incompetent student driver.
Having always wanted a pickup, Taylor was immediately fond of the spirited rustbucket, but the true bond was cemented along the Sausilito-Legett segment of Highway 1, north of San Francisco, after the full day along a mostly deserted cliff-side beach highway and a long night weaving through a forest.
Update, 2021: Doing a little maintenance (technical and grammatical) on the blog, I’ve reread the archive from this trip start-to-finish. What a time. Back when we all thought this would be the only one. The missing chapter never recorded here, because I couldn’t believe it myself, was how it all ended. A year or so after this trip, I compiled a printed book to tell the full story, so allow me to add that final episode:
Although the particulars of this trip have always been flexible, let’s recognize that most of it, surprisingly, went according to plan. This afternoon, we confronted a miscalculation over one bit of minutiae. Put as delicately as possible: over our dead bodies would we surrender these heroic automobiles.
From the drive up to Los Angeles to pick up Bumbles, we knew George would be hard-pressed to give it up. And indeed, even from the start, he was almost as invested emotionally as financially. By San Francisco, he was vowing to bring home the Bumblebee unless it truly betrayed him. He never even listed for sale.
Evan spent the first part of the trip actually complaining about some of the Alfa’s quirks, then spent the latter half of the trip trying to continue his whining so that parting would be easier. He listed the Alfa on Craigslist back in Portland and had been screening calls since, but he received no solid offers.
So George and Evan spent the afternoon of our arrival into Seattle entertaining quotes from uShip contractors and other freight companies looking to mail their cars home.
I, on the other hand, was determined to be sensible! This was a summer fling: picture perfect, immensely enjoyable, undeniably unforgettable, but so obviously over. So I listed the truck on Craigslist just before leaving Indianola. In truth, my car was the most likely to sell quickly because others may consider it a work vehicle. I really thought I could let it go. Suddenly, my phone rang. And my heart plummeted. As I became increasingly traumatized fielding calls, I heard George strike up a conversation with his shipping contact:
Yes, and there’s a third, but it’ll be shipping to Austin, Texas. It’s a Nissan hardbody truck from the eighties. Okay, yeah, I’ll have him call you.