Road Trip Dreams

My wife Maire Anne and I are about to go see our middle son, Kyle, in Santa Fe. He’s lived there for ten years so we’ve done this numerous times before, but there’s something about this part of the country that stirs up dreams of past adventures and beckons new ones.

It was 41 years ago when Maire Anne and I were living in Austin. We were planning to go backpacking for a week in the Weminuche Wilderness northeast of Durango Colorado. I’d just rebuilt the engine in her ’69 Volkswagen Westfalia camper, so we were looking forward to both the road-trip-campground part as well as the backpacking.

Unfortunately, shortly after departing, the camper began running badly. Dejected, we limped it back to Austin, uncertain of how to proceed. I’d recently bought a Malaga ’73 2002 and sold my well-sorted ’72, but the ’73 was a completely untested car.

“What’s actually wrong with it?” Maire Anne asked. “Well, for starters,” I said, “It burns oil. I can hear the giubo banging when I accelerate. And it’s got no spare tire.” Faced with cancelling the trip, I threw a case of Castrol and a can of Fix-O-Flat in the trunk, and tried to drive as if there was an egg between my foot and the gas pedal lest I destroy the giubo (and yes, I threw a spare one of those in the trunk as well) and we made it the 700 miles to Santa Fe the first night (I remember getting very confused by the fact that that stretch of I-25 North through Santa Fe actually went south). It was the first real road trip I’d ever taken in a 2002.

The next day, we arrived in Durango, and few days into the hike, when we reached the Continental Divide, I asked Maire Anne to marry me. So it was about as memorable as a road trip gets.

Somewhere in that backpack was an engagement ring.

Fast-forward to about eight years ago when The Great Professional Upheaval occurred. Fifteen months earlier, I left my three-decade job as a field geophysicist developing and deploying equipment to find unexploded shells on old military training ranges. Bentley Publishers, a company that publishes four-inch-thick repair manuals, had published my first book Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic and offered me a job writing more books. I took it and wrote the electrical book and the vintage ignition book for them, but then due to changes in the publishing world, the job abruptly ended. I briefly went back to my old geophysics job and did one last survey for them in Denver at The Former Lowry Bombing and Gunnery Range, driving around in a small UTV towing an array of metal detectors and centimeter-accuracy GPS receivers on land that had been in the boonies on the prairie in Aurora until the new Denver airport was built there and caused the suburban sprawl to roll right up to the fence.

During the two months I was out in Denver, I had a hankering to find a well-priced needy vehicle from this low-rust part of the country, nurse it back to health, and road-trip it home. I mean, I was out there, I had weekends free; why not buy something and drive it home? My son’s father-in-law Michael is a dyed-in-the-wool car guy like me, and offered that anything I found could live at his place in Santa Fe while I did any necessary preparations.

That triggered the idea of finding a small RV that Maire Anne and I could use for a national parks road trip, which then morphed into finding a Vixen, the rare BMW turbodiesel-powered boutique RV. Incredibly, I did find one in nearby Albuquerque that Michael and I actually looked at, but it was so far gone that made no sense even if I could pick it up for my usual bottom-feeder price. You can still find the two pieces I wrote about it (Part I and Part II) up on the BMW CCA website. (Even more incredibly, last month I received an email from someone (Dwayne Domi) saying “I just purchased Vixen 0092. I’m going to LS Swap it after I finish the LS swap in my main Vixen.” It took me a while to realize that he was talking about the exact one I looked at eight years ago.)

After the geophysical survey ended, I found myself without stable employment for the first time in my adult life, and began the process of seeing if I could cobble together enough income as a self-employed writer to make a go of it. I started writing these online pieces regularly for BMW CCA (something I am eternally grateful for), and also established a foothold with Hagerty.

Then, in the winter of 2017, an opportunity to buy a decade-dead 1972 2002tii down in Louisville presented itself, and the idea of swooping in, resurrecting it where it sat, road-tripping it home, and writing about it took root. With my newly-precarious financial situation, committing time and money to this was crazy, but I had no regular job, so if not now, when? I floated this on Facebook, and BMW CCA member Jake Metz, who I’d met for maybe ten minutes the previous year at The Vintage in Asheville, said that he lives in Louisville and could put eyes on the car to get me added information for the sale, and had a pole barn where I could work on it. Oh, and I could stay with him and his wife Liz while all this was going on. So the big resurrect-the-car-and-road-trip-it-home adventure took place not in the heat of the southwest, but in the rust belt in winter.

Jake and I about to pilot “Louie” out of his pole barn.

The whole Ran When Parked adventure with was unique, addictive, immersive, and transformative. I have a lifelong tendency to have trouble committing to a big-picture goal unless I can see every step along the way. While prep and planning are good, at some point you need to jump. I’d thought through the process to the point of figuring out that it’s just not feasible to simply buy a dead car, show up, and tell the seller that you’re going to set up a tent on their property until you get it running and ask if you can use their shower every couple of days.

The car either needs to be running, or you need to tow it to a friend or relative’s house where you can make it so. Any advanced recon you can get is worth its weight in Castrol. For example, Jake told me that not only was the giubo destroyed, but the center support bearing was too, so I went down there with a driveshaft onto which I’d installed both. And as carefree and vehicularly romantic as throwing caution to the wind and setting off in a known-to-be-needy car and fixing it by the side of the road by pitting yourself and your tools and your wits against it when it breaks may be, it really makes sense to get as much of it done as possible before you set out. Because otherwise you’re driving seven miles at a time and having parts overnighted to the nearest Motel 6. I also learned that prioritizing the things that the car needs to reliably propel itself down the road (ignition, fuel delivery, charging, cooling, belts) is absolutely essential, and if you don’t treat everything else as utterly secondary, you’ll be sorting the car out forever. But the part where the people who made the whole adventure possible—Jake and Liz, Dave Gerwig, Lance White, Zach Kettering—were folks I either had never met or barely knew was something I never could’ve predicted, and that grace will stick with me for the rest of my life.

On the one hand, having done the Ran When Parked adventure, maybe I don’t need to do it again (and believe me, at age 66, the romance of fixing cars in the breakdown lane isn’t quite what it used to be). But on the other hand, I now know what the logistics are, so the pull remains strong.

And so to no great surprise, prior to heading out to Santa Fe, I find myself combing Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist to see if there’s anything that blows my skirt up. Unfortunately, there’s not much. The low population density translates into a far fewer number of interesting cars (Albuquerque is bigger, but still a pale shadow of Boston), and to increase that, you need to spread the search north into Colorado.

This is a trip to see our son. My wife’s saint-like credentials are beyond reproach, and my running off for an hour to look at a car would be fine, but hijacking the whole trip to, say, check something out 400 miles north in Denver wouldn’t be cool. Even if I decided to ditch my 2008 Nissan Armada and pick up a rust-free 2nd-gen Toyota Sequoia, there are only a handful advertised. I did find this, but as much as I love the look of old sun-baked American wagons, I don’t think that’s the automotive hill I want my marriage to die on.

Great yard art. If I had a yard.

Still, even without the visceral excitement of a resurrection and a road trip, there’s the idea of looking at low-rust cars with my own eyes and potentially shipping something home, right? Nothing’s popping up when searching for the usual retinue of 1970s-era BMWs, E30s, vintage Lotuses, 1973 Fiat 124 Sport Coupes, 1963 Avantis, Opel GTs, TVR 2500Ms, and Triumph GT6s. The best match is this decently-priced 1982 320i 5-speed right in Santa Fe. Hey, if the a/c works…

Hmmmmn.

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