Part Two of an article I wrote for Classic Car Magazine in 1990 interspersed with some of my driving cartoons.

Getting Sixteen Miles per Rolaid in a 1951 Plymouth: Part 2

I eased onto the road and made it the hundred feet to the top of the pass with no incident. We cheered. I put the car in neutral and let it coast. A few miles later, though, we came to another hill. I went up it at 15 mph all the while keeping an eye on the heat gauge. It was working its way back up. A humongous mobile home, more like a mobile housing project and the sort I had previously cursed as they crawled along the road, passed us.

From the top of the hill we saw another even bigger hill. This time, instead of putting the car in neutral, I floored it and raced down the hill. By the time we hit the bottom, we were going 95 MPH and got halfway up the other hill without having to give it any gas. Susan, white-knuckled, looked at me as though I was out of my mind. We went on in this roller coaster fashion for twenty miles. At the top of every hill, I popped another Rolaids. By the time we got to Bend, we were both drained. “How are we ever going to make it through the Rockies?” I asked.

Susan suggested we worry about it in the pool. One of Susan’s and my goals in life is to skinny-dip in as many bodies of water as possible. We’d hit three oceans and most of the major rivers and lakes on four continents, but we’d never before skinny-dipped in a Best Western pool. In the moonlight, in the nude, we pulled out our Rand McNally. She said “Via Ogden, Utah. The mountains there look like they’re mere foothills.” I popped another few Rolaids.

In addition to skinny-dipping in the Snake River, a major highlight of Idaho were the Hummingbirds, a troop of elderly women on tour from Canada staying at our hotel in Mountain Home. They gawked at the car. Finally one of them asked, “Is it a 51 Plymouth?” I said yes. She giggled. I leaned over and whispered “Did you … um … did you lose your virginity in one by any chance?” She giggled again, smiled and walked away.

Utah was breathtaking. Shooting straight out of the earth were the Rockies. “You call these foothills!” I cried to Susan. “I’m going to get out of breath just holding my foot on the gas!!”

She said not to worry. She’d filled the radiator with water that morning. Steve, a friend of Susan’s and an expert on cars, had told me never to put straight water in the radiator unless it was absolutely the only thing available. “Why did you do that when Steve expressly forbade it?” I asked testily. She said, “I think the car’s overheating because you have too much anti-freeze in there. Steve doesn’t even put anti-freeze in his own car.” I sighed, popped another Rolaids, and let her take the wheel.

Thirty miles outside of Ogden, near Devil’s Slide, we and the car needed to cool off. Also, we couldn’t go through an entire state without skinny-dipping at least once. In case anyone spotted us, we took along some jugs so that we could claim we were just getting water for the car. We climbed down a steep cliff to swift-running Lost Creek for one of the most refreshing dips we had on the whole trip. This was in part because we felt we were getting away with something in puritanical Utah.

When we arrived in Evanston, Wyoming, just 73 miles from Ogden, I asked, “Was that it? Are we out of the Rockies so soon? Why, those were just foothills.” “See,” Susan said. I popped another Rolaids.

When we arrived in Little America I checked how the car was doing on gas consumption. Gas was what Little America was known for. For hundreds of miles hundreds of billboards had been telling us they had 64 gas pumps. We’d gone over 1,000 miles and used 50 gallons of gas. I was pleased since I had developed a theory about gasoline prices and long-distance travel. Lots of stations sell gas for 81¢ a gallon, but they are 20 miles past the stations where you’ve filled up at $1 per gallon.

A similar principle holds true for hotels. Hotels that advertise rooms for $14 are the ones you pass around noon. By six in the evening, we never saw one for less than $30.

Hotel design didn’t vary much from one end of the country to another. Out west they had names like The Hitching Post and The Big W Ranch; in the midwest, The Pioneer and Grandmother’s Place; and out east Colonial Manor and Ye Olde Inn. But they all had the same design: a parking lot in front of a box that contained a number of square-white rooms. Each room came with a TV and an uninspiring painting with an inspirational saying on it.

The one bit of novelty we came across was in Idaho were the lamps were so hideous I was tempted to make off with one. The base was a carved cowboy boot with a gun and holster wrapped around it. I looked around the schlock sold in the gift shop of Little America figuring that if any place would sell such a lamp, they would. Alas, they didn’t, so we left, reading the sign that thanked us for stopping and said they’d see us again in a few hundred miles where they only had 50 pumps.

At the continental divide, we let the car cool down for a bit. Not finding a place to skinny dip, we settled for peeing on both sides of the line.

The next day we slid into Nebraska. From Nebraska, it was all downhill. I didn’t even start the morning out with any Rolaids. We stopped in Sidney for breakfast. We sat between a cowboy nerd, a pimple-faced young man with large black-framed glasses and a ten-gallon hat that dwarfed his scrawny body, and a farmer we nicknamed Tiny, a three-hundred-pounder wearing a baseball cap with fluffy little sheep all over it. Tiny asked the make of the car. “A 1951 Plymouth,” I said. He grinned and said, “Really.” The cowboy nerd looked as though, much to his distress, his virginity was still intact.

We spent the night in Nebraska City, a town with at least five mortuaries, a “Bank in a Box,” and one hotel. We got out of there before sunrise and went for a skinny dip in the Missouri River on the Iowa border.

I’d been dreading Iowa. I’m somebody who lumps all “I” states together with New Jersey as a place you wouldn’t want to visit, much less live. I was pleasantly surprised, though. We both loved Iowa. It wasn’t as flat as bordering Nebraska and Illinois are. Iowa was full of green rolling hills, hills big enough to provide variety to the scenery, but not big enough to heat up the engine. People in Iowa were also more open than in Nebraska. In Iowa passing drivers actually waved. In Nebraska, the greeting was more subtle, just a raising of the index finger off the steering wheel. I didn’t pop a single Rolaids through the entire state. We left Iowa as we had entered it, with a skinny dip, this time in the Mississippi River.

In Illinois the Gray Ghost rolled over 100,000 miles. We celebrated with a glass of orange juice that had fermented from sitting over a hot muffler for a week.

Indiana, another of those “I” states, gave us more excitement than we cared to have. We hit the beltway around Indianapolis in the middle of the noon rush hour. Susan and I suddenly felt as though we were Ma and Ma Kettle and were unwilling participants in the Indy 500. As we passed a sign for the Highway Evangelical Church, I popped a few Rolaids and said a small prayer because the heat gauge’s needle was slowly going up. Susan, ever full of good cheer, said this was just a trial run for Cincinnati, which we would hit just in time for evening rush hour. I popped a few more Rolaids and turned the wheel over to her.

Not only did we hit Cincinnati at rush hour, we hit it in the middle of a monsoon. We’d never found a replacement for the wiper that had slimed the slug, so I had a viewing area about two-inches-square. Susan said, “You know, we should have probably had the brakes checked after we finished coming down the Rockies.” We slid into the nearest gas station, using the parking brake to stop two inches from the garage door.

A mechanic tried to check our brake fluid. As he unscrewed a bolt I said, “I think that’s where the oil filter is.” He said, “Well, there seem to be brake cables going into it.” When he took the lid off and said, “Yup, that’s the oil filter all right,” I popped a Rolaids and pictured having a $400 bill for a botched brake job.

An older mechanic came out and asked, “A 1951 Plymouth?” I said, “Yes.” Nudging the young mechanic he said, “Lost my virginity in one.” He said to look under the driver’s seat floorboards. We were completely out of brake fluid. Five minutes later and only $2.65 poorer, we were back on the road.

The only challenge I thought we had left was the steep winding hills of West Virginia. It took us four hours to go ninety miles. When the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia finally came into view I said, “The Rocky Mountains were beautiful, but these are beautiful too because they represent home!”

It turned out we still had one more trial to go–the D.C. roads. As we bounced around and passed a sign that said, “Your D.C. tax dollars at work,” one of my hubcaps popped off and rolled into the Potomac.

We’d made it, 3,468 miles in nine days using only 165 gallons of gas, 13 quarts of oil, one gallon of anti-freeze, eighteen gallons of water, one can of brake fluid, and 22 rolls of Rolaids.

***

Driving Cartoons for magazines, brochures, ads, web site, books, etc. So cheap you can use them to sop up oil dripping from your car.