Random Firings by Hank Farber

My daughter just returned from a cross-country road trip, and I am quite jealous. I have driven back and forth across the United States and Canada numerous times, and I am always struck by the variety and beauty. Our usual mode is to stay off the interstates as much as possible and never to eat at fast-food restaurants. We have found some spectacular driving roads this way (e.g., Rte 12 in Idaho), and we have eaten at some very interesting places in towns along the "blue highways."

My first trip across was in 1969, when I was commissioned by a business associate of my father to drive his cherry 1957 Thunderbird to San Diego. I did this trip with a childhood friend of mine. Great car, but we had to have the hard-top on because, after all, the hard-top had to make it to San Diego as well. The distance from New Jersey to San Diego is just shy of 3000 miles, but the route we "found" was about 4000 miles.

When my wife and I were married in 1972, our honeymoon was a three-month 13,000 mile motor/camping trip through the U.S. and Canada. I drove a pseudo-BMW in those days. It was a 1971 Datsun 510, which was essentially a BMW 1600 (OHC engine, independent rear suspension), but the 510 was even more prone to rust than the BMW. I know that this is hard to imagine, but it is true. Our route took us west across Canada, over Lake Superior (a beautiful drive) and back into the U.S. through Glacier Park in Montana. From there, we headed south and west through Washington (Cascades, Olympic Peninsula) and Oregon (Crater Lake). We headed south down the Pacific coast through San Francisco and on to Los Angeles and San Diego. Then it was time to head east to Arizona (Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon) and south to Mexico for a short visit. Then it was east to New Orleans. Since I had seen "Easy Rider", we then made a quick (and I mean quick) dash from there to D.C. and home to New Jersey. There was much more, but this is getting too much like watching slides of someone else's vacation. We did a lot of camping, stayed with relatives some, and stayed in motels a few (4) times (once for $5). Our total expenses were $1000 for the three months including gas and oil. As an economist, I am compelled to do the conversion to current dollars for you, so the $1000 in 1972 translates into about $4100 in mid-2000. Still a bargain and memorable.

Our next trip was in 1983 when I took a year's sabbatical leave from MIT to spend the year at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford. We had two young children (5 and 2) and another "in the oven". This time, we used a full-size Dodge Van (no resemblance to any BMW) with the 318cid V8 and took five weeks to drive from Boston to Palo Alto. The key to traveling with young children is not to push it. We did three or four hours a day, found a good place to camp, and played and swimmed to rest of the time. The down-side of this trip was that my 2 year old son thought it was fun to kick the back of
my seat the entire time. This son survived and can now be found with me on rallys and at the occasional drivers school (including our upcoming Summit School in August). We returned the following July (1984) and took three weeks, now with the addition of our 8 month old son and my new motorcycle. Oh yeah, I also towed home a 1960 Triumph TR3a (identical to my first car) in very good (no rust) unrestored condition that I kept for the next fourteen years.

The cross-country Dodge van adventure was reprised in 1989-1990 when I again took a year's sabbatical leave at the CASBS. This time the children were 11, 8, and 6, and they all have strong memories of this junket. We took a more southerly route (i.e., the northern US and not Canada), and my children all remember fondly "sitting on a Teton". This time the motorcycle went both ways with us, and we drove home with a second vehicle, a 1983 Mercedes 300TD (wagon) for my wife. Given the amount of stuff we had to schlep both ways, we towed a trailer made from the rear end of an old Ford F100 pickup with a cap. This weighed a ton and surely contributed to the failure of the main shaft of the transmission on the Dodge. My kids nicknamed the van and trailer the "Death-Star", and each of them custom painted a surface of the trailer in ways that reflected their personality. We used CB radios on the way home to keep in touch, and the "handle" for the Mercedes was appropriately "Utter-Chaos". So calls of "Death-Star to Utter-Chaos" and vice-versa were common.

Finally, I did a trip in a BMW. In 1992, I was at the CASBS for the summer, and my brother wanted a 2002 since I had just snagged for myself a 2002tii that he had wanted. So I found a 2002 (perhaps not the best one, but relatively solid), and he flew out so we could drive it home. Between the time I bought it and the time he arrived, the clutch shredded itself and the car began to run hot. So we had the clutch fixed, and we bought and installed a used radiator. I will save the saga of that cross-country jaunt for another column, but suffice it to say that we made it (even if we couldn't exceed 60 MPH without overheating the car). That 2002 saw serious drivers school service and now resides comfortably behind Vic Lucariello's garage.

Bottom line: For any of you with the time, a leisurely motor trip to the left coast and back is surely the stuff of which great memories are made. And it is even better in a BMW!