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Date:   Fri, 9 Feb 2007 15:42:26 -0600
Reply-To:   joel walker <jwalker17@EARTHLINK.NET>
Sender:   Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:   joel walker <jwalker17@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject:   Frydaye Phollies: a bigger long road trip - part A
Content-Type:   text/plain; format=flowed; charset="Windows-1252"; reply-type=original

someone mentioned Route 50 some time back when Route 66 was being discussed, and i found this in another old magazine ... might make an interesting road trip. :)

The Heartland Highway Running U.S. 50 from sea to shining sea, Across the best of America in the Teutonic Tomato.

By Larry Griffin Car and Driver

If anything good can be said of it, the dead of a Michigan winter at least brings your brain to a boil. You steam about how late spring will arrive, and you make hot plans for balmier days. I plan big drives. A year and a half ago I planned a drive that promised the best of everything from sea to shining sea. Only one road fills the bill, and that’s U.S. 50.

Beginning at the Atlantic in Maryland and pressing all the way to California and the Pacific, Route 50 rumples and reaches across 3100 miles of everything America holds near and dear. No other road, big or small, samples so many of our national facets. The Congress should rename U.S. 50 the Heartland Highway.

May would be the proper month to go, and a Porsche 911 Cabriolet would provide the proper means. Porsche said do it, so I phoned old Santa Barbara pal Dale Jones, who once ran the best BMW store I’ve ever seen and twice sold me cars. Jones is a good friend, a find amateur photographer, and one of the half-dozen road drivers I trust. His smooth driving is a match for his quick New England wit. In a trice he was primed to desert his high-roller insurance clients and his California girls for two weeks of touring over the Heartland Highway. But we had to wait four months.

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The month of May in Maryland comes out of the blocks with a rush. The Sheraton Fontainebleau Inn & Spa sits along an array of high-rises on an Ocean City sand bar, and our red 911 convertible sits in front of the lobby. We have packed the car in the cool Atlantic dawn. Top down and buckled in, we point the growling Porsche west. A sign on the bridge over the Sinepuxent Bay says “Sacramento, California—3073 miles.” Then it’s rolling grasslands, everything clean and manicured, thick stands of pines, and a couple of meadowlarks playing slap-and-tickle in a meadow. (Where else?)

Spring is just climbing into the trees as Route 50’s four lanes run their fingers through the woods. Running east to west has romance. By the time 50 slims down to two lanes in Virginia, we’ll be following the route of the pioneers.

We bitch about the 911’s archaic character. Related controls are strung all over the interior, the mirrors quiver as if in a seizure, and the cruise control reengages with full-throttle glee after a downshift. But the rowdy flat six feels as if it will push the drag-inducing ragtop within a whisker of the coupe’s 150 mph.

The 911 burbles over the Choptank River, named for the Indians who once populated Maryland and now populate Michener’s tome Chesapeake. We’re headed for Kent Island, in 1631 the first English settlement in Maryland, to go crabbing and boating with a pal of a pal. The pal is Tom Hall, an infamous navy PR flack who once finagled me a most memorable ride in an F-4 Phantom (for which I will one day get even), and his pal is Jack Robinson, a former air-force PR flack who introduced himself to Hall by horning in on his date quicker than you can say “Jack Robinson.” Tom calls Jack the King of the Eastern Shore.

These days, Jack sells almost-unsinkable rescue boats. “They’re a meeting of three technologies,” says Jack. “Inflatable keels, deep-vee fiberglass racing hulls, and lightweight outboards. You sit in the middle, straddling a saddle like a snowmobile’s, with stirrups. You can turn full-lock at 40 knots! Ever tried to put a basketball underwater? Foop! Almost can’t.

“On a different subject: You’re on the Delmarva Peninsula – for Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia – and the whole world went right past here. Kent Island’s 21 miles long and a mile wide, and people make a living by farming and being watermen – crabbing, oysters, and so forth. Just across the bridge to Annapolis, it’s like light-years away from us. The whole Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake is a state of mind. And James Michener ruined it, the son of a bitch! But we go crabbin’ all summer and goose huntin’ in inters -- there’s a million geese on this peninsula. So it just runs a little cycle; you throw in a little sex and you stay busy! Actually, I got to know Tom ‘cause I was trying to rehabilitate him. There’s no hope.” Jack cackles in his beer.

Hall stays on the dock to supervise, watching through yellow binoculars big enough to spot the Canary Islands. Jack and his son David load us into a cardboardy troller and show us how to crab, lowering a line tied at intervals with chicken necks. You give the crabs some time to latch on, hook the rope over a spindle on the boat, and troll along, madly netting the crustaceans as they ride up. The more beers you down, the faster Jack runs the motor. Satisfied that we’re in the mood now, Jack has David show us how the hot-rod rescue boat works, and it’s a snap, even for a landlubber like me. Within minutes, I’m making wall-of-water U-turns at 50 mph. Eventually we make for the house to gorge on crabs and corn on the cob cooked by Jack’s daughter.

We say our glassy-eyed goodbyes and hie off to Washington. The Hay-Adams Hotel faces the White House. At $300 per night, our double is worth every penny. We order a snack, scrub up and lounge around in Hay-Adams robes.

Sun streaming through the balcony doors wakes us, and the sprint is on to beat the crowd to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Its Milestones of Flight Hall hosts fourteen million people every year. This towering aviary displays the Wright 1903 Flyer, Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis”, Yeager’s Bell X-1 rocket plane, John Glenn’s Mercury spacecraft, and the Apollo 11 module that carried Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon. These are not replicas; these are THE machines that flew. Visitors stare at the enormous Saturn V aft end, whose rocket nozzles lifted six million pounds of spacecraft. Astronauts reach their work by sitting on explosions. A wondrous IMAX film shot by the space shuttle crews wraps views of Earth on a huge dished screen, back by rocket thunder and a score that celebrates Earth’s majesty, and offers the bittersweet sight of Judy Resnik, so lovely and intent, on an early flight.

Washington is an extravaganza of great buildings, greenery, and monuments. Along the Mall, a cute blond girl of thirteen sprints alongside to get a picture not of a landmark but of the 911. But a brush with angry marchers in front of the White House, chanting “Reagan, Reagan, liar, liar, we’ll set your goddamn ass on fire!” and eyeing our Teutonic Tomato, makes us aware of our top-down vulnerability.

Across the Potomac and into Virginia, we pause at the massive memorial to those who raised the flag on Iwo Jima and skirt Arlington National Cemetery.

Scads of construction sites clot the route, but it soon trades suburban clutter for gentle farms. A 70-foot lavender wisteria tree grows beside the Little River Inn. Old stone fences pile high around the fields the stones were cleared from. Nearby, Virginia designates 50 the Mosby Highway, honoring John Singleton Mosby, the famed Gray Ghost of the Civil War.

Beyond Hogue Creek, a mountain range rises steeply, its corners wearing mustaches of gravel. Just after Shaffenhacker Mountain, we pop over the crest, squinting into the sun to see 50 turn into a weaving river of silver amid the fur of gray-green forest. Route 50 is a road of many names. Around here, it’s the George Washington Highway.

In West Virginia, the lights of Clarksburg spread across its valley. The service at the “Sherato” Hotel (burned-out letter, not to mention staff) borders on nonexistent. Was it only this morning that we basked in the Hay-Adams?

The next morning we set off to find Clarksburg’s vaunted Stonewall Jackson statue. We find Stonewall amid Education Fair Day, whose entertainment is a grade-school choir, watched by proud moms, early shoppers, and a few sugar addicts who have pulled off a dawn raid on Dunkin’ Donuts.

The plan calls for hitting Cincinnati by dark. Skeptics back in the C/D compound in Michigan have started a pool on how many speeding tickets we’ll get. (Our goal is zero, and we’ll meet it) Jones and I have our own bet regarding chance romance, but so far, zero across the board. We stop in Spring Run Road to shoot pictures of a likely moonshiners’ route – a hillside dirt furrow back into the folds, surely sprayed 40 years ago by dust thrown by the slewing Ford coupes favored by generations of bootleggers.

A flash of lightning bashes overhead. We leave the top down but pick up the pace, leaving the rain high and us dry. By the time we reach Parkersburg and a gas station on the Ohio River, steady drizzle thrums us. A pop of the easy-up top and we’re cozy.

There is more truck traffic now, but the landscape falls flat beneath our P7s. The map shows more wiggles near Chillicothe, Ohio. Chillicothe is where Junior Johnson served time in a federal penitentiary for moonshining. Junior once told me he’d made 3000 liquor runs, sometimes four or five a night, and he estimated he had been chased 1000 times. But they caught him only once, at his daddy’s still. A few years after he got out for good behavior, he won the Daytona 500. Last year, the president pardoned Junior. Now he can vote again.

We whistle past a tall, austere farmhouse, festooned with ornate filigree and great spiky lightning rods that jab the sky from each peak. Water for the crops is easy to come by around this agricultural spongecake of rich earth. The enormous fields are sunning themselves and soon will pop in the summer’s heat.

Closer to Cincinnati, 50 settles into bottom lands. We stay at one of Jim Trueman’s Red Roof Inns. In three weeks, Bobby Rahal, who drives for Trueman, will win at Indy. Days later, cancer will kill his mentor. The thought of the battle Trueman is fighting brings sadness.

Wednesday morning brings a visit to Cincinnati Microwave for a tour of the high-tech palace that Escort radar detectors built. Nowadays, Escorts and their little-brother Passports lead the market. Beavering away in a spacious, carpeted work bays on ergonomically comfy chairs, among colorful murals and the makings of thousands of detectors, are several hundred tech-talking engineers, fuzzy-cheeked kids, matronly women, and pretty younger ladies. We watch a winsome blonde program her huge machine for runs of solid-state circuit boards. She pushes the start button and monitors the chip-installation head, which is spinning at a pace blurred beyond comprehension, its half-dozen nozzles spitting a multitude of tiny chips precisely into place on each board.

Miss Microwave asks if I get to Cincinnati often. I vow to make a place for this tender chip on the circuit board of my heart. Jones groans, fearing for his bet.

We scoot out of town through a slum and a sampler of horrible chemical smells. Life with an open car isn’t always sunshine and champagne.

Crossing into Indiana, you sense that this is where farming buckles down. But what is it that holds up old barns? The rickety structures look as if they should have collapsed years ago, but they’re still imploding in the slowest of motion.

Pines are in natural harmony with lower Indiana’s weather and stuck beneath many of the triangular trees, like gingerbread ornaments at Christmas, are slab-cut log cabins. In fact, this stretch of 50 is known as the Lincoln Heritage Trail. We cross the waters of the Wabash into Illinois and put the Porsche into a lope. A semi-trailer has pulled over at a revival meeting, where a marquee proclaims “Jesus Christ, His Majesty.” As if the biggest of guest stars were on stage inside.

You get a great view of the famed arch as you cross the Mississippi into Saint Louis. The barges are so humongous that even Mark Twain’s imagination might boggle. Immediately west of Saint Louis, 50 mates with I-44 as the wrinkles come back into the landscape. Splitting off, 50 curls through the village of Useful and past Spud’s Auto Sales, toward the state capital, Jefferson City. The pavement narrows sporadically, transforming this leg into one of the best GT roads in the country. The pigs around here are so big, they think they’re cows.

The capital, named for the Virginian who represented the term “Renaissance man” better than any American before or since, contains one of the most impressive capitol buildings in the country. In front, an Amazonian state of a naked lady looks down, longing for the Porsche.

We give up the ghost at a Holiday Inn south of Route 50 at the town of Lake Ozark. The pretty brunette at registration sighs and says, “That’s the only kind of car I ever dream about.”

We’re getting close to my land. A year ago, I bought 3.6 acres of wooded magic that looks south and west across Lake of the Ozarks. My parcel offers 600 feet of lake frontage and 90 miles of lake. A clearing on a bluff will provide an unobstructed view for the main house, and a cubbyhole in the trees will nestle a writing studio that will look out at the panorama through the branches. It’s all part of Malcolm Forbes’s Lake of the Ozarks development. After I signed the papers on the spot, I began seeing ads for the place in airline and business magazines. The view most often used shows MY land! Whenever I spot these ads on a flight, I say, “See than? That’s mine.” And whoever is sitting next to me looks askance and says, “Sure.”

to be continued ...


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