Breckenridge Or Bust
Page Two of Four
Well here we go. We're packed and it's 10:20 a.m. Wednesday July 15. It is a beautiful 80 degrees outside. Woodie and I are off. We just get on the freeway, and it dawns on me, it might be a good idea to leave flowers for my wife, so that she knows that I'll miss her. First stop, the Lucky's Grocery store right by our house. O.K., so this is the first time that Lucky's has been out of flowers (except for two wimpy half-dead bouquets). Now we are off to Safeway. Sucess! Now we are really on the road. It's 11:00, and "Bad Company" is on the radio playing "Movin' On"...a perfect road song to kick off a week long road trip.
The first stop is Nevada City. At roughly 12 mpg, and a 12 gallon fuel tank, we will be stopping a lot. Tap, tap, tap. I roll down the window, and a woman in her fourties greets me, "I love your car!" This senario gets repeated fill-up after fill-up. I marvel to myself. Ten years from now will people be walking up to restored Escorts and saying, "cool car, dude"? Will there be a Taurus Club of America? Will Dodge Neon owners congregate yearly to distant parts of the country to share the cars of their youth? It is obvious that carmakers have forgotten about personality. Even entry level autos need personality. Mazda has it right with the Miata, and so does VW with the new Beetle. I hope that more car companies rediscover the things that make great cars.
A half an hour later as we climb
Interstate 80 over Donner Pass, I'm reminded how far those boring
cars have come technologically. As Woodie wheezes and the thin
air cannibalizes her horsepower, I watch the fuel injected
Escorts and Tauruses fly by on the left. "Yeah, but I LOOK
cool!" Even with the V-8 at full throttle, there is
only so much you can do with only two gears.
The last time Woodie was in Reno was the day my wife Candi and I eloped and were married. That was 1992. As I fondly remember that life-changing road trip, the cell phone rings and it is my lovely wife. She had just come home on her lunch hour and discovered the bouquet of flowers I had left for her. We shared our memory briefly, and the call was over. It was time to hit the road again.
Woodie was running strong, and the highway was wide and clear. One thing sixties cars do well is cruise on freeways. Interstates were designed with cars like the Falcon in mind. Smooth, wide and basically straight. I took Woodie up to 80 mph. and pointed her east. On and on, one mile turns into a hundred, and Nevada just keeps looking the same. Good thing they have gambling, if their tourism depended on sightseeing, they'd go broke.
Planning stops became very important in the more rural areas of Nevada. When the freeway sign says "Next Services 75 Miles", you stop regardless of fuel level,because at one half tank showing on the gauge, we probably wouldn't make it another 60 miles. Woodie is running strong, but the amount of crankcase blow-by has increased drastically. The right side of the car is getting sprayed with a light film of engine oil carried in the blow-by gasses, making quite a mess. At each fuel stop, small puddles of oil fromed under the passenger side of Woodie. It looks worse than it is; the oil level on the dip stick remained fairly consistent.
We stop in Elko, Nevada at about 8 p.m. and I got a bite to eat at the local Burger King. A girl and two guys in a Toyota strike up a conversation. Turns out the guys are a couple of mechanics at the local Ford dealership, and the girl is a car buff too. (she's the one who asked to see the engine!)
About 15 miles outside of Elko, I notice Woodie isn't running as well as she had been. I pull off the road and discover that the oil blow-by is clogging the air filter. I remove the filter and push on, but she still isn't quite normal. At the next fuel stop I figure out another piece of the puzzle: California Regular has an octane rating of 87, but someplace along the line in Nevada the octane rating of Regular dropped to 85! I notice that even Mid-grade is rated at 86. Those oil company sharks are forcing me to run Premium. I'm usually not a mooch, but the extra 40 cents a gallon is going to add up quickly at 12 mpg.