Hell-Ride '01

At long last, the story from my and 02McDonald's July 2001 roadtrip from Lincoln Nebraska to Montgomery New York (and back) in his 1960 VW Singlecab.
In looking through the photos to include in this post, I was struck that not a one was taken from the moving truck. Ah well.
Initially we'd intended to stay off of interstates as much as possible, in order to better see the world, and because the top speed on this rig was about 60mph. Upon setting out however, we agreed to exempt the Hawkeye State from this rule, and took I-80 straight through it as fast as we could so we wouldn't get any Iowa on us. Inside Illinois after crossing the Mississippi at Quad Cities, we hopped on US 6 until our first stop at Illini State Park, across the river from Marseilles. I like to tell the story of this particular camping experience, so here goes: we pulled in late and were starving so McDonald set up his stove while I set up the tent. The campground abuts the Illinois River and this being mid-Summer there was no shortage of flying bugs. Moths, various beetles, and mosquitoes alike were attracted to the light of the cooking flame, confounding his efforts to make us a couple grilled cheeses by getting themselves hopelessly stuck in the cheese. Eventually hunger overtook our squeamishness--and McDonald's patience for picking the insects out one by one--so we ate the sandwiches, bugs and all.
Our time the first day wasn't as good as we'd've liked, and neither of us could be accurately described as early risers, so the next day we gave in to the interstate and took it from Chicago onward, except for a shortcut we took (at my suggestion) through some of Gary Indiana's worse neighborhoods to avoid construction delays. We were way late by this time, so interstate it was through all of Indiana and into Ohio until...

...pulling off to get gas in Elmore Ohio, I (or was it McDonald?) pressed the clutch pedal all the way to the floor without getting the expected action at the other end. The cable was broken. McDonald did thirty miles of clutchless driving (including circling in a parking lot while waiting for a red light) and got us to East Harbor State Park, where we set up camp and commenced opening some brews. The next morning he phoned Cram Foreign Auto Parts in Omaha and had a new clutch cable overnighted to us at the campsite. We took the turn of events as a sign that we needed to drink beer all day long during our unintended day off, becoming minor celebrities at the campground in the process (the general state of the truck and its Alaska plates helped). One guy even spent most of his honeymoon sitting at our campfire drinking beer with us. Another guy we drank with until early in the morning almost talked McDonald into getting a tattoo with him. The cable arrived on day four of the trip and was installed without delay, since we were now a day behind and needed to get all the way to Syracuse New York by that night.

Syracuse was where our friend Eric was completing grad school and part of the excuse for the trip was to see him. He and his wife Reagan were very accommodating, so we let Eric take Noel (that's the truck's name) for a spin around his neighborhood (Reagan wouldn't go near it). He was horrified by the gaping holes in the floorboards, holes that during the trip consumed, among other things, my big plastic mug, a calculator, and probably about 10,000 cigarette butts. Noel is a rusty beast.

Finally after another night in the Catskills, we arrived at the Tri-States (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut I guess) VW Show and entered Noel in Class 'L', pre-1967 non-camper Type IIs. This red-on-white '66 was the only other entrant in the class, so Noel got second place.

Another shot of the Class 'L' entrants. We thought the guy with the nicely-restored '66 was a little miffed that the completely unrestored '60 was parked next to him and so was in most of the shots of his bus.

"Hippie" bus from Jersey.

I hope this immaculate '72 actually gets used and isn't just a trailer queen.

What ACVW show is complete without Beetles upon Beetles?

I can't believe that someone would put such awful wheels on such a nice Oval. Note the tailpipes.

It's either a 1999 or 2000 Beetle, believe it or not.

Sleeper?

That night we headed into New Jersey and set up camp in High Point State Park. The ranger told us to stow our food well, as this part of Jersey has the highest concentration of Black Bears East of the Rockies. I thought this was pretty amazing, given that we were only a little more than ninety minutes outside of Manhattan.

Our last sight-seeing-y thing was a stop at the Latrobe Brewery, home of Rolling Rock (or at least it was when we were there; it ain't anymore). I used to drink Rolling Rock almost exclusively, and always found it amazing that you never knew how a given bottle might taste--sometimes skunky, sometimes smooth, sometimes bitter. I suspected that they never actually wrote the recipe down, but we didn't take a real tour so I'll never know. As we pulled into the lot, we were 133 miles into that tank of gas (Noel didn't have a gas gauge, so we wrote the mileage of each fill on the dashboard in pencil).

The rest of the trip was mechanically uneventful, except that the passenger-side door stopped cooperating someplace in Indiana and had to be strapped shut. During a downpour in Illinois the cab was taking on so much water that it was running--not dripping, running--down my arm as I drove. Hell-Ride '01 ended after a 14-hour drive (700 miles) from Kil-So-Quah State Recreation Area in Indiana back to Lincoln.

I should've taken more pictures.