Several times rolling along some remote stretch if Italian highway or by-way I’d get this rush of excitement wondering what we would see down the next mile of road or around the next corner.

Now back in the state 15 years later with a laundry list of responsibilites I don’t have as much fun driving the back roads like I did. I’ve thought alot about it and think that it is a combination of being over familiar with this area, a TN landscape which doesn’t lend itself to long views down the highway – always a curve or hill in the way – and the never-ending supply of modern day crap everywhere I look. Miles and miles of billboards, McDonalds, strip malls, and the same franchise storefronts everywhere we go.

Gone are some of the interesting stuff left over from the early 20th century that seemed to be everywhere when I was a kid. Maybe it’s a regional thing, maybe I’m concentrating too much on the traffic and missing the good stuff…

Whatever the case we gotta get out of town for a few days later this year!!!

Dad had a series of Toyotas (3 Celicas and a Landcruiser) that were A+ back in the 70’s and 80’s. Never any real problems. Only the Landcruiser was as minimalist as the Corrolla was back then.

BTW, no oil = no go on any plain main bearing car. That quart of sludge in somebody’s clunker must have covered the oil pickup at speed.

A few generations and a world of refinement later, my wife’s mom got many trouble-free miles from her FWD ‘90 Prizm, too. Yet, adjusting for the greater reliability of all new cars today, I don’t have the same confidence in the new Corollas as in those old ones. What a soldier that old hatchback was.

But in the late 80’s I got my shot.

I’d always pestered my neighbor with the tired (170,000 mile) grey ‘75 Corolla to sell it to me.

One fine morning, she knocks on the door. Moving, she only wants a hundred bucks for it.

Loud, slow, minimally comfortable (the broken driver’s seat didn’t help), but it just seemed right somehow, like an old airplane. I drove it everywhere.

That first month, I visited a friend’s family grass airstrip. The grass was overgrown, so high you temporarily couldn’t fly in or out, so my friend and I ran the Corolla up and down the strip a few times at 65 mph. The grass was higher than the hood, so I was glad my buddy knew where the runway ended.

On the way home I thought to check the oil at a gas stop, and raised the hood. Grass seed covered every horizontal surface, all those greasy little alcoves.

Well, the next time I check the oil, there’s beautiful green grass coming up everywhere under hood !

It had sprouted in the accumulated grease…

In fact, my ‘77 didn’t rust badly until it was more than 10 years old. When it got to be 15 yrs old the problem became serious.

The car also, amazingly to me, did quite well in snow with a little bit of ballast in the truck. And it was incredibly durable. It didn’t have much power, so I was always flooring it, and revving it really high. The engine was still going strong when I sold it at 161k. The transmission was also doing OK despite my frequent clutchless shifts.

What I learned was this ‘tin box’ of a car was well screwed together, comfortable, and of a different world than our detroit rides. Along with a friend who had a FRONT DRIVE subaru (1978) and used to burn out from the front, we knew that our old muscle cars were fun, the new iron sucked, but the Japanese and later German cars (Rabbits, etc) were the “new deal”.

Thirty years later, while Detroit has built a few decent cars (amidst the chaff), our driveways are still full of….Japanese and German cars.

Cool! A local TTAC rep. Great story about the Rice Rocket Brigade. I had a similiar experience coming down the pass once, but it was a brace of classic Corvettes, so they weren’t going anywhere nearly as fast as the EEPROM chippers.

I’d love to mount my hi def Canon camcorder to a the front of a fast car and film that drive. I’ll have to “test drive” a Lotus this summer…

Oh, and my first car was an 81 Corolla. Dog shit brown, auto, am radio, no air-con. So of course my insurance listed it as the Deluxe model.

Maybe that’s what I need after the semester ends, a trip to nowhere in particular (in my Ranger of all things). Pack a tooth brush, change of clothes, and then just start driving. Thanks for the inspiration and the story. Now all I need is to find an old Corolla :P

Andy D: did the Joads have a Hudson

YUP and John Ford was true to Steinbeck in the movie. In closeups, you can see the white triangle of the insiginia. One of my favorite movies.

I did have a bad experience once there, a car club from Portland, kids with their tricked out Civics. But they must have been straight-line racers, because they couldn’t stay on their side of the road on those super-tight hairpins for anything. And the nightmare was, they just kept coming, one after the other, cutting blind corners and trying their best to run me off the road.

Best driving road near here I can think of is the Mackenzie Pass highway. CLosed for the season, but damn it was a blast last summer in my 85 Faux Runner. A true corner-carving masterpiece, replete with a martian landscape up top. I can’t wait to take my Integra up there when it opens.

H

I know Hwy 190 very well. It caused me to stay in California for longer than I expected on my “Back from Iraq Cross-Country Blast” in my Porsche Boxster S. You crest the Panamints after a day of hiking the Race Track Playa, and you and your car are dusty, worn out, tired, but looking for more adventure, and you see the Sierra Nevadas highlighted by the setting sun.

Moments to live for. Especially with the top down and you have Jimi Hendrix “The Experience” on the CD player.

Kerouac has nothing on your stories. Look forward greatly to the next one, if only to inspire my next Roadtrip….. which will be out west… again….

P.S. Grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, I know exactly what you mean about the deserts and mountains!

Toyota’s RWD Corolla was rusty junk its entire lifetime.

Both Corolla and Chevy Chevette seemingly had all but a couple hundred pounds of curb weight at the wrong end of the car, as did the B210 Datsun. If those cars had possessed today’s crappy rear bumpers, they’d have gone nowhere on snow and ice as the only way to get one going was to find your fattest neighbors to sit on the back bumper.

Or perhaps the oil pressure sending unit wasn’t working properly. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I’m just relaying a story I heard in 1992, 16 years ago. Perhaps I wasn’t told all of the facts and/or I’ve forgotten something. Who knows?

If there wasn’t enough oil to prevent starvation the oil pressure light would have been on long before the engine would get abnormally hot, if not immediately after startup. But maybe that car didn’t have an oil pressure sensor.

Your story reminds me of the Geo Storm my sister had. It was her $500 backup beater that became her daily after somebody stole her Prelude. I had flown in to D.C. to visit her and while I was there, she asked me to give her car a once over, just to be on the safe side. She had been driving it around for at least a month, but she never had the time to let a mechanic give it a tuneup.

So, I pop the hood and the first thing I do is check the oil dipstick. Bone freaking dry. I check the coolant. Bone freaking dry. Filled up the oil and coolant, changed plugs, etc., and it started up like a champ. To this day, I can’t believe that car stayed running.

I enjoyed a journey of the same Kerouac-ian parameters in a cherry 1952 Hudson Hornet. It had a 308 flat six with Twin-H-Power-two one barrel carbs and a three on the tree with electric OD. That car, in addition to being able to run railroad tracks, could cruise 100mph, comfortably, while getting 20 mpg. I enjoyed the same vista in the Owens Valley, and I had great difficulty reintegrating after that idyllic summer (1971)
OOOH man, you gotta finish the tale. Hudson’s were a great marque and were main characters in 2 great American novels and 1 minor one. Grapes of Wrath, On the Road and, Moonshine Light, Moonshine Bright by William Price Fox.
A rather unique feature was the wet clutch, which was cork lined and never wore out if the oil was changed occasionally. In early NASCAR days , they were hard to beat.