Isn’t it amazing that we have the power to point a compass east or west, drive for a few days, and end up on an unrecognizably different part of the continent? Freeways, main streets, endless straight and hairpin turns, there’s just so much out there to see. In the words of Andrew McMahon, “I’ve never been so lost, I’ve never been so much at home.” We all have those journeys we can’t wait to take again, but what about road trips you never want to repeat? Now’s the time to shine a little light on your least-favorite road trip stories of all time. Here’s one of mine.
Late in secondary school, my daily driver was an entirely preposterous lowered Crown Victoria with some interesting modifications. It was very much the definition of a $550 car — the check engine light bulb had been on for so long that it had burned out, the brake light switch let its smoke out twice, the timing cover was made partially of JB Weld, and the maintenance history was questionable at best. However, because it had enormous bench seats and plenty of cargo space, this would be the machine I’d call upon for a road trip from British Columbia to Ontario in pursuit of higher education. My parents probably thought I was nuts.
The first few days actually glided by nicely, aside from having to jump start the car right at the very start of the road trip. The leg to Calgary was smooth sailing, as was the one to Moosomin, Saskatchewan. We’d worked everything out to a series of pre-determined stops, and in the interest of avoiding an overnight stay in Manitoba, my next stop after Moosomin, was Dryden, Ontario. Why’d we pick this small city roughly 400 miles north of Minneapolis? Well, because it was as far as we could reasonably drive in a day. As golden hour drew, we rolled into the local Walmart to grab food for the night, and inadvertently came across a scene. Are those people… street fighting in the parking lot?
Yes, yes they were. It was then and there that we decided to keep driving until we reached the next available town with a hotel. If you’ve ever been over the top of Lake Superior, you can probably tell where this is going. By the time I reached Thunder Bay behind the wheel of a $550 car with half a Coke can of ground clearance and one headlight partially aimed by friction, it was too late to check-in. We’d just have to press on.
There’s an eerie stillness on the Trans Canada highway at two o’clock in the morning. A certain awareness that the only thing standing between you and decapitation-by-moose is a flimsy A-pillar designed around the turn of the ’90s. Spotty cell phone coverage means no stopping unless you see a gas station, dim headlights meaning you never quite know what’s around the next turn, other than certain construction. Will you hit gravel at 50 mph with little warning? Who knows? The only thing you can do is drive. So drive we did, right through the night and into the morning until we were almost in Toronto. For those keeping track at home, that’s more than 1,400 miles from hotel to hotel with just two driver changes. Not exactly ideal, and while it’s a fun story, it’s not something I want to repeat.
Nor do I want to repeat the time something decided to expire in the rear suspension of my parents’ Toyota Sienna, hours from home. Above 50 mph or so, it shook like it was mixing paint, and while that’s unpleasant, rising sibling tensions in the passenger compartment made the experience even more unpleasant. One surefire way to make on-the-road failures even less enjoyable is by adding irritable children to the mix who just want to get home, but who are also sick of the vibrations. We were all sick of the vibrations. So very over them.
Anyway, what’s your worst road trip story? Was it a tale of a trip that went on for far too long, one of mechanical woe, or perhaps one of something else throwing a wrench into the mix? The comments section’s your canvas, and you’re Jackson Pollock. I can’t wait to be regaled with your worst road trips.
(Photo credits: Thomas Hundal)
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Geeze, there are so many ridiculous trips I’ve taken over the years…
I drove an M1028 from KC to Chicago. Top speed of 55mph and it required a fuel filter about every 75-100 miles…
I made a two-day no-sleep trip with a friend to Tennessee and back to Chicago to pick up a Kodiak service truck purchased from a railroad auction. Neither of us had a CDL. We had to service a pair of loose hubs on the steers to make it stable enough to do highway speeds. The bearings looked bad, and one seal was sketchy, so we just packed them FULL of grease and kept pumping grease at every stop. This was also the trip I learned that I can only eat biscuits and gravy three times in a row; after meal #4 I experienced a life-changing bowel movement.
Drove a lifted TJ from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico and back up through Memphis. Had to rebuild the adjustable control arms on the trip.
Several long trips in open top Jeeps.
I bought a ’70 F100 off a classic car lot in St. Louis in January that had been sitting so long it had to be pulled out of the divots it sank into. Added 3 qts of trans oil and drove it back to Chicago. That spring I found out it had a wasps nest in the seat when they started pouring out of it WHILE I WAS DRIVING on the first warm day…
Dunno about *worst* road trip, but the one that had the most crap happen. In 2004 I bought a 40K mile ’00 Saab 9-5 SE V6t just like the one in Shitbox Showdown the other day. In Oklahoma City, of all places (found it on eBay). Same color even, but tan interior. A friend of mine who was a Volvo mechanic at the time, decided to go with me to drive the car back to Maine, though he had to work the day I was leaving so I was going to fly out, pick up the car, and then pick him up in Springfield, MO, the next day. He wanted to swing by a friend’s place in NY and swap the brakes on her Volvo for her, so he had a bag with tools and parts with him. Plan in motion, flew out, picked up the car with no drama, it was as advertised and perfectly delightful. Get and OK temp registration, but oddly, they don’t do temp plates of any kind, so there are no plates on the car. Dealer assures me this is perfectly fine. Then the chaos began.
So first thing, I am cruising from OKC to Springfield and get pulled over for 4mph over by an actually very friendly State Trooper. While I was on the phone with my old man telling him that things were going great. Just got a warning that they were doing an “enhanced enforcement effort”. Noted, no harm, no foul. Get to Springfield, spend the night, get a call from my friend, he wasn’t paying attention and missed his connection. Next flight is in four hours. So we decide that he will change his flight to the next city up the Interstate – that was St. Louis. We both get to St. Louis. Of course, the checked bag with the Volvo bits and tools does NOT. That bag ends up chasing us across the country.
Next thing that happens, we are cruising across IL and stop for lunch. After lunch, car is dead as a doornail – I had noticed slow cranking, so not super surprised. There is a battery place a block or so down the road, and they have the right battery. GREAT. But they would not lend us the 13mm spanner needed to R&R the battery, despite just having spent $200 on a Bosch battery (and of course, Northwest still has the bag of tools and Volvo parts). But they will do it for us if the car is in their parking lot. Mind you, you can SEE the car from the shop, it’s literally two buildings down the street in the cafe parking lot, about a 3min walk. Wankers. So I had to call AAA to tow the car 500 feet. AAA dude was also not impressed and gave the shop an earful. But anyway, problem solved by application of credit and AAA cards.
Bag is supposed to be in Cleveland. We get to Cleveland, Bag was NOT in Cleveland, so redirected to Rochester, NY, where his friend is.
Leaving OH, we need gas. Stop at random gas station at 11:30 at night off an exit. Start pumping gas, nozzle feels a little funny but I don’t think much about it. Gets where I am thinking it must be full, and it doesn’t stop! Gas starts fountaining out of the car, nozzle is stuck on. Friend runs into the store. ~16yo kid manning the register has no idea where the shutoff for the pumps is! Meanwhile, a SERIOUS lake of gasoline is forming under my car. My friend FINALLY finds the shutoff on the side of the building and kills the pumps. All of them. Something like 50 gallons has gone into an 18gal tank. And kid wants me to pay for all of it. Uh, no, I am not paying because your pump is broken and you don’t know how to work the most important bit of safety equipment there is in a gas station. Here’s $30 for the gas that went in my tank (the good old days, no?). Here is my name and number if your boss wants to discuss this with my attorney. Have a nice night. Then we very gingerly pushed the Saab out of the lake of gasoline and made our way to our hotel for the night.
Next day, make it to NY State. My friend is driving, and he is hauling ass a bit. Easy to do in the smooth and quiet Saab wagon. Gets pulled over by a lady NY State Trooper for 85 in a 65 oops. Lady Trooper asks us the usual questions. Cannot wrap her mind around why we are passing through NEW YORK to get to MAINE from Oklahoma. This completely and utterly baffles her. Obviously, not a geography major… Not a word was said about the car not having any sort of license plate, go figure… Of course, with no license plates, I did not bother to put my EZ-Pass in the windshield for the various tolls all the way home. 🙂
Got to Rochester – surprise! no bag of Volvo bits. So to heck with it, send the damned thing to Portland and we will get it when we get home. And NWA DID manage to get it back to Portland, and he picked it up on his way home from my place.
Other than the battery, the car was great. Was great for the four years and 45K I put on it, and for the Saab Club buddy I sold it to in 2008 who STILL HAS is, having put another couple hundred K miles on it. I don’t think he’s actually driven it in a very long time. The timing belt came due, so he stopped driving it as he had couple other Saabs, and he just never got around to doing the belt. Then I think a snowplow hit it plowing his driveway or something. AFAIK, it’s still sitting in a driveway in Milwaukee.
Pretty car:
https://flic.kr/p/2tiqtp
Those are very rare Saab accessory BBS wheels that I picked up at one of the Saab Owner’s Conventions back then.
I remember this car, and that had to be Max you were traveling with. I think you and Steve came down in this one when he picked up our ’90 744T in 2005. I still feel bad he was disappointed because the paint had chalked. I should have buffed it for him.
It sure was, and yup, that would have been my daily in 2005. I’m still good friends with Max, he’s not a mechanic anymore, mostly does construction and general contractor work these days. And I got him into BMWs, LOL.
I could KILL my mother and grandfather for trading that Volvo and the one she had for a damned Dodge Caliber for my idiot brother and sister-in-law, Steve having sold it to my brother. There was nothing wrong with it but a dead heater fan. They got less than the cats were worth at the time in trade. Of course, didn’t say a word to me until after they had done it. That Caliber was, of course, an absolutely epic turd that made the two ancient Volvos look reliable. Sigh. Thankfully, Mom started listening too me after that when the time came to buy cars. Though she stupidly let my nephew use the Prius V I got her to buy and he killed it. Seems to run in the family…
Not sure this truly counts as a “road trip”, but a friend and I spent a Saturday evening in St. Helena, in Napa county, which is a couple of hours from where I live in Sacramento. From Napa, you can either head south to I-80 and then east to Sacto or you can take scenic Hwy 128 directly east over some mountains. 128 has the added virtue of being two lanes and twisty, so that had been our route out to Napa. It was around 9 PM and dark by the time we left, though, and as I was driving us in my car (a ’20 M240i), I just figured we’d take I-80. My friend’s phone indicated that 128 would be quicker, though, and with some minor misgivings, I decided we would go that way. We were about 40 minutes into the drive when the rock came up out of nowhere and took out the left front tire. Of course, there’s no spare in these cars and the rather gaping gash in the sidewall meant that the “mobility kit” (a can of repair goo and a compressor) would contribute to no mobility whatsoever. And we had no cell service, to top it off. Fortunately, we had passed a bar about a quarter of a mile back, so I turned the car around and we limped over to the Turtle Rock Bar and Grill. The folks there were quite nice, and the gal tending bar let us use their landline to call AAA, with the caveat that they were closing in a half hour or so. AAA was pretty vague about when we could expect a tow, so we figured we’d be waiting outside for quite a while, but just as they were ready to close, a couple came in who knew the bar’s owner. They yukked it up and downed shots for a bit, and just as they were getting ready to go, another couple came in who knew the owner. This went on for a couple of hours until the poor bartender was finally able to shut the place down and go home at around midnight. AAA came twenty minutes later, but this doesn’t end there. The tow truck driver didn’t want to take us all the way to Sacto, so once we had cell service again, I found a repair shop in Winters, a small town off of 128, that Google said was open on Sundays. When we were dropped off there, I confirmed that the sign on the door stated that they were open seven days a week. So the next morning (Sunday) I called and there was no answer. No big deal, I thought, as there’s no way they’d have the right tire anyway, so I ordered one on Tire Rack to arrive there Tuesday morning. Monday morning I call again and…… no answer. (Yeah, apparently the sign stating that they were open seven days a week was just a tad inaccurate.) Tuesday morning I call, and a gruff dude answers. I tell him that I own the blue car sitting on his lot and would he be able to replace the tire for me. The answer was, “I don’t know if it’ll fit my machine. I’ll call you back”. Four hours later, I call back to let him know the box sitting in his shop was my new tire and to see if he’d managed to check his “machine”. Very gruff answer was, “I didn’t call you back, did I? You just dumped the car here without warning, I’ll get to it when I feel like it. If you don’t like that then take it somewhere else.” So I called another place two blocks down and the guy there was happy to do the job. I drove my wife’s car out there, picked up the new tire, limped my car the two blocks over, and finally got the damn tire replaced. Overall, a huge pain in the ass, but we met some cool people at the Turtle Rock and now know a repair shop to avoid like the plague if we’re ever back in Winters.
It still gives me a chill, nothing tragic, and almost forty years ago. Six friends and myself drove a 1972 VW bus five hours north to Massachusetts for a friends wedding. It was this time of year, brutally cold, the bus owners solution to the practically non-existent heat in those, was a Coleman Stove that only made a notable difference to odor. Max speed, maybe 50mph with 7 onboard, lots of angry, honking traffic. Who in their right mind has a wedding in mid December?
I mean in colder climes, No offense.
Should have been 5 hours, it was 7, but I slept for 2, and it was snowing and at night.
Coleman stove sounds like a prescription for carbon monoxide poisoning!
Yeah, it was a terrible idea, and a cooking stove, not a heater. That bus was far from air tight, so probably not too bad, but not good. We gave up on it after half an hour.
In my comanche- fresh from paint, not really tested beyond some town driving. A friend and I were going on a trip from Atlanta to Branson, MO and back with it.
We loaded it up with snacks, drinks, and an extra 5 gallons of gas just in case. Plus antifreeze and oil. And all went well through tennessee! A couple random hiccups.
We stopped somewhere north of knoxville first. The missing was getting worse. And when we opened the hood, the pcv failed and blew oil everywhere. Luckily it was a jeep town and the autozone had a new dizzy cap, rotor, and pcv. Wrong pcv. But we fixed it with zip ties and rags and it worked! The missing stopped too.
In Nashville, the missing came back. We stopped at a mcdonalds and tried diagnosing. We thought coil maybe, spark issues when it heated up. We got going again and made it to peducah, where we found out it was the fuel pump as it died in the parking lot (I suspected the pump months earlier, but never touched it). Bought a jack, stands, tools and replaced it there. Got a hotel since we werent making it that night.
Next day, 7am. Roll out and go to the gas station to fill up. 7 gallons in… waterfall. Fuel pump seal was bad, no replacements around. So do we drive on, only having 6 gallons at a time? Give up? Tow? I called penske, they would have a truck at noon. The truck was a 30footer. Oof. But diesel! We towed it there, arrived at 6. Had a great night with the JP motorpool, and left at 6am. Why? Had to be in south carolina the next day for a wedding.
Its a great story. But it was a bit of a bummer since it wasnt the fun drive we planned.
Southern California to Las Vegas. Either direction. Any time of day. Any time of the year. It’s dirty, dark, too cold or too hot, crowded and the only places to stop are homages to the American consumer’s love for oversized sodas and candy.
Nothing worse that being on the 15 in the middle of nowhere in stop and go traffic
If you have the time Oct-Mar skip the long 15, go through Pahrump, death valley and Panamint Springs. It will add hours to your trip but man it’s certainly unique.
There’s too much negativity in this world. Here’s my best road trip:
Santa Fe NM to Vancouver Island (Tofino to be precise) and back during the Summer of 2022. My wife and I visited almost a dozen National Parks/Monuments, State Parks, and Canadian Parks. Seventeen days and 5000 miles total.
Our 2012 Golf performed perfectly.
Best road trips are a tie for me. The two times I did European Delivery for new BMWs. First in 2011 for the 328i wagon I still have. Went with a friend to Munich to pickup the car, then to Stuttgart to the Mercedes and Porsche Museums. Then on to Berlin. We were meeting up with another friend from the US and a Swedish friend in Stockholm to go to the Saab Convention in Finland. So a crazy overnight thrash from Berlin to Stockholm, with a couple of hours on the ferry from Germany to Denmark just in time for dinner on the boat. Then another ferry to Finland with our friends, toured all over Southern Finland and the convention. Back to Sweden for another couple of days of touring around including the Saab Museum in Trollhattan. Dropped the car in Amsterdam. My friends flew home, but I stayed another week. I have another friend in Amsterdam, we drove to Paris and met with yet another friend from the States and saw Ralph Lauren’s car collection on display at the Louvre. Amazing trip from start to finish. And I still love that RWD 6spd wagon like it’s my first born child. Still only has 55K on it.
Second time, I took my mother over for a month picking up a ’16 M235i in 2015. Went to nine countries all-together. My friend from Amsterdam met us for another trip to the museums in Stuttgart. We went to Dachau (sobering, to say the least). Spent a week visiting friends in Budapest. From there to Italy where my bestie flew in to meet us for a week. Finally drove back across Switzerland and went to the Sclumpf Museum in Mulhouse France. Dropped the car off in Paris after spending a couple days there. Trip of a lifetime for my Mom, and I had a great time too. Didn’t love the car though, traded it for a GTI when I moved 3/4 time two years later. Decent 5th car, lousy only car. Great fun in Europe where you could stretch it’s legs, but boring in the US where six second on the gas was “go directly to jail” speeds.
Thankfully BMW both builds nothing I want any more AND doesn’t offer European Delivery anymore, because that is as addictive as a crack habit and just about as expensive. Came VERY close to doing it for a Porsche Cayman for my 50th birthday in 2019, but my inner Yankee Cheapskate just wouldn’t let me spend that much money on a car that I very well might have also found boring back in the states. Bought a new Fiata instead for 1/3rd the price.
My cousin used to do Montreal Winnipeg non-stop via the Trans Canada. It would take him 28 hours with pee and gas stops.
1995, my mom was driving me, my older sister, her friend and her friends kid from near Waco to Albuquerque in a teal daihatsu rocky. Somewhere near Clovis, engine locked up. I remember how cold it was. My grandmother ended up driving up in her 4th gen mustang to pick us up and we all crammed into that car to ride home. It was rough.
Also had my older sister fall asleep while driving through West Virginia and drive right off the edge of the freeway off basically a cliff. Truck landed perfectly to end up with no damage and we were fine.
I had to take a 2000 mile trip in a car without a Jatco Xtronic CVT….
That’s true of ANY trip in a car without a Jatco Xtronic CVT.
It’s bad enough as a passenger to miss the sweet smooth silence of such a modern marvel of engineering but it’s so, so much worse for the driver. That poor driver has to endure not only the absence of that sweet smooth silence but also the head hanging shame of piloting a car without a Jatco Xtronic CVT between the engine and the wheels.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDSqODtEFM
My trip in the autumn of 2009 from the seaside town of Beidaihe back to Beijing. I had made this normally 4-hour highway trip many times without any problem. The road was known for fog, especially in autumn, so I knew what to expect. I had driven there in fog before, small and big. But that time, the mist was just out of this world, clouds on the road, darkness. I drove my Beijing-Jeep Cherokee XJ, with my then-new girlfriend by my side.
The first hour was okay, and then suddenly, the fog closed in on us, limiting sight to only a few meters. We stopped, waited, the mist got less, we drove on until the fog got worse again, we stopped, and repeated. I mostly used the middle lane, with the alarm lights on, the fog lights on, and the main lights turned off. I used the horn non-stop. It was an incredible trip, with the mist reflecting lights, fears, and fantasies.
Very stressful at the time, but a great and treasured memory now. All in all, it took us 12 hours to get back home, arriving in Beijing in the early morning, instead of the previous evening, as we had planned. It also was a great get-to-know-you experience, the new girlfriend eventually became my wife, and we are happily married with kids today. The lesson: never stop driving, just get on with it.
I call it: “The last stand of the Cherokee”.
When I was in highschool, I drove an absolutely BEAUTIFUL 1991 Toyota Pickup 4×4. 5 speed, extended cab, it was the fuckin’ bizness. One problem, it had the legendary 3.slow, which had a propensity to blow head gaskets. Well, during the summer right before I was about to start college, it did just that. In a panicked, state, I sold it for NOTHING (this wasn’t exactly pre-Toyota tax either), and spent my first year at college without a car.
For my sophomore year, I decided I wanted a car. Hopped on the ol’ Craigslist, and found the most PERFECT ride for a college student who lived in an apartment and only had a small box of tools. A 1977 Jeep Cherokee for $650. Went and looked at it, got it running in the parking lot in which it had been sat for the past 2 years, and drove it back to my apartment (only broke down twice!). Fixed a few things, and it gave me relatively little shit for about a year. Made 2 trips across the state back home (which in a 1977 Cherokee in Eastern Washington summer is fucking horrid). On my third attempt, the last stand happened. I had been driving for about 3 hours, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, in about 100 degree heat. The truck started to surge, and lose power. I limped it to a rest area, figuring it had just experienced some vapor lock, and had to let the carb cool down. It never started again. NEVER. I tinkered for about 2 hours before giving up, and called a tow truck. Spend HOURS baking in the desert sun, and then another several in the truck back to my apartment. Over the next year I spent hours trying different things, but it was just too much to do without a proper garage and tools. Ended up buying my 2001 Tracker from my sister, and hauling the Jeep back across the state where it slumbered for the next TEN years or so.
Since I’m back on that side of the state, AND I have a garage now, I figured it was time to try again. Went through it slow, making sure we had the 4 elements of combustion. Sure enough, last summer marked the first time it had run in about a decade.
I’m quite proud of that honestly, and I think the only reason I did it was to prove that I could. It’s undergoing a (slow) total restoration currently, and I can’t wait to have it back on the road, so I can make that god-awful trip again.
Side note- DT is incorrect about the AMC 360. Fucker sat a decade with no intake manifold on it parked on a bluff above the Puget Sound and took pretty minimal effort to get going again. Past me was pretty smart though, poured MMO down all the cylinders and over the valve train about a year after I had parked it.
When I was a kid, my cheapskate parents got a hand me down bike. They then decided to strap it to the roof rack for the 12 hour drive home. Trying to protect the bike, they tossed an old vinyl tablecloth over it. With the front wheel sticking up, making a giant sail. We amazingly made it a few hundred miles at highway speeds. Somewhere in the Midwest, the roof rack flew off, bicycle attached. Since the bike was undamaged despite flying off the car at highway speed and bouncing off the road, my parents decided to jam it into the very full car and press on. I had to deal with a pedal and gears threatening laceration the six hours home. I hated that bike.
In the early 2000’s at the age of sixteen, I flew to Colorado to pick up a 1973 Datsun 240Z after purchasing it off eBay motors (when you could still buy a classic car in tolerable condition after two summers of jobs and selling a drum set). The plan was to road trip with my dad back to Georgia. Somewhere in middle-of-nowhere Kansas, it lost all power. With few available resources to diagnose the problem, we resorted to trailering it home behind a Uhaul box truck.
Fast forward to college. Leaving lower Alabama with my school’s FSAE team, we drove up I-75 to Detroit in May, including traveling through Ohio. That’s it; that’s the bad part: Ohio. America’s Sweatpants. Detroit was marginally better as this was before the economic recession, and we enjoyed driving on Eight Mile Road (the movie had debuted in theaters a few months prior).
Last one. A little over a year ago, I drove from southern Georgia to Lafayette, Louisiana to undergo flight training for a new off-shore job. This was in late September, when it’s still hot and humid in the Deep South. The air conditioning on my ’99 F350 gave out midway through the fifteen-hour journey. This added to the misery of the absolutely abysmal condition of Louisiana roads. I was on a time crunch, so couldn’t stop and work on it. Pulling into my hotel parking lot, my A/C compressor seized, snapped my serpentine belt, and killed my power steering. The fortuitous part is that I was able to coast the truck into a parking spot.
In college in the late 90’s I drove a 1972 Cutlass. It was actually pretty dependable since I had to drive it home from Detroit to NJ a few times a year. One year during the trip, somewhere in the middle of nowhere PA, a blade broke off my radiator fan and sliced through my radiator. (Both these parts were less than a year old by the way, since the radiator fan had broken and sliced through a belt the previous year.) I made it to an exit off I80 but it was a Sunday and nothing was open. I was able to find a rental car place at a small airport nearby that was open and paid some random guy at a restaurant to drive me there, where I got overcharged for a rental car because I was under 25. I drove the rest of the way home and returned a few days later to return the car, pick up my car, and pay a bill for the radiator and fan repairs. I still had to drive it back to NJ after and then back to Detroit, because it was time for the annual vehicle inspection in NJ.
I-80, very western edge of Nebraska, in a first gen Honda Odyssey, with wife and baby still in an infant carrier. Half way through a twelve hundred mile trip, following a thunderstorm that didn’t stay ahead of us.
It started downpouring and hailing, so we ducked under an overpass. The pavement was already filled with other stopped vehicles, so I had to pull onto the grassy area between the cars and the guardrail.
It hailed. It poured. Radio reported a tornado on the ground eight miles north of us. Fun times.
Eventually the storm passed and everybody cleared out, so we had room to get back onto the roadway. Unfortunately the ground was so wet the tires sank into the mud and I couldn’t get the car back onto the pavement (concrete, with a sharp edge – the ruts I was making were over three inches deep, and the side of the tire just wouldn’t grab onto it).
A couple of trucks stopped to help, but nobody had a tow rope. AAA said it would be a four hour wait due to the distance and prior calls.
Ended up having to send the wife and baby with a couple in a U Haul to the next town 8 miles away where we already had a hotel room booked, and I waited with the car, all the while kicking myself and wondering if I’d ever see my wife and kid again.
At about the hour and a half mark a truck stopped by that did have tow rope, and he got me back onto the pavement. Thankfully the wife and baby were fine when I got to the hotel.
To this day, every car we own has a tow rope, jumper cables, and a shovel (similar stories from my high school days are the reasons for the other two pieces of equipment), and only once since have we made that trip in a car without some type of four-wheel or all-wheel-drive system.
TLDR: Spent the night in the no-man’s zone between Guatemala-El Salvador because the borders close at night due to guerilla attacks…
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In the 90s I hitched a ride with a relative in a Jeep Comanche pick-up (instead of taking the bus as usual)… We took a longer route because he had to go to a town near the coast.
After that we headed for the border but because this is a longer route it means it’s not maintained as well, or at all… We didn’t want drive late (guerillas), so he drove too fast for the condition of the road, and after hitting a number of potholes the fan hit the
shitradiator…So we got some water with some locals and kept driving, adding water every now and then until we got to the Salvadorean border at around 6pm. We got our stamps and crossed a bridge to the Guatemalan border, and when we got there they had already closed, thinking nobody was going to come anymore…
So we went back to El Salvador, and they had closed right after we left…
So back to the Guatemalan side and spent the night there, hoping there was no attack that night… Tried for a while to sleep on the truck bed, but the bugs were eating me alive…
Next day we kept going until we found a mechanic in a small town, and finally arrived in Guatemala City later that night…
All for not wanting to take the bus…
The roadtrip from DC to Pittsburgh from Hell.
My goal was to leave a little later to beat the crush of rush hour knowing I’d get into Pittsburgh around midnight. This is about a 4.5 hour trip
I left my apartment in DC around 6PM on a Friday. I hit a light accident on I-270 north about 30 minutes into my trip. Traffic slowed, but wasn’t stopped completely. It took about 15 minutes to get through the back up.
I got on I-70 west and everything was going great. Maps showed a small yellow spot, but nothing I wasn’t used to. I passed an exit and thought to myself, maybe I should take route 40 to get around that yellow spot, but ultimately decided the backup didn’t look to bad. Then! Taillights. Complete stop. This was around 7:30. I sat as fire truck after fire truck after cop after cop went by. We sat for 4 hours or so until the road reopened. I won’t go into the details of the accident or what I saw when we drove by but it was a baaaaaad accident.
It was already after 11 and I still had 3+ hours of my trip left. Anyway, I pushed through, and got on the PA Turnpike at the infamous Breezewood. (~2 hours from Pittsburgh). Not 20 minutes after I was on the turnpike, I started noticing debris and car parts on the road and came up on an accident where a car swerved, hit the jersey barrier and flipped. Luckily everyone was ok, but that took an hour 30 minutes of pulling over, calling 911, etc. Thank God it was late and the turnpike was dead.
All that to be said, my 4.5 hour trip became a 9-10hr trip. I rolled into the driveway at somewhere around 3-4 AM.
Gulf Coast of Alabama to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. I have done this one about 8 times, 1,500 miles each way. Every time in winter.
Because my sweet wife was from AL, she was afraid to drive in the snow, and the mountains. So I have done almost every mile as the driver. And every trip was a non stop slog, like 30 hours without a break except for coffee and piss breaks.
Thank God we had some weed to make it a bit easier.
Once got 2 speeding tickets within 20 miles outside of Dallas. 8mph over the limit BTW. By the same god damned Texas State Trooper. Damn woman, screw her…
Did I say that Texas sucks the big one?
Returning to Alabama is like, well you can guess, right?
And driving through Texas, La. and Miss. is like pissing on my foot.
Next time, I’m gonna try I-80. Can’t be any worse, right? /s
Just watch out for those Midwestern storms in Nebraska.
We would drive from Mpls. to Colorado to ski for 10 years.
The joys of crossing Nebraska in a VW Bus with 7 people is a memory not easily forgotten. Especially into the wind. Or when my old man would get pissed off and throw one of the kids out on the side of the highway and drive off.
One time we lost 4 pairs of skis off the roof of the bus in one shot.
Taught the old man not to have an 8 year old install the ski racks.
Good times…
I bet he spent his golden years complaining to everyone about how the kids never visit.
You are right about that.
“Once got 2 speeding tickets within 20 miles outside of Dallas. 8mph over the limit BTW. By the same god damned Texas State Trooper. Damn woman, screw her”
Texas uses the Prime Facie and basic speed limits. As such the numbers on the signs are open to interpretation:
“Texas’s Prima Facie Speed Limits
Some states have “absolute speed limits.” With absolute limits it’s simple: If the sign says the speed limit is 40 miles per hour and you drive faster than that, you’ve violated the law.
Texas, however, uses prima facie speed limits. If you exceed a prima facie speed limit it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re guilty—you still have the opportunity to prove in court that your speed was safe. If you’re able to do so, the judge (or jury) is supposed to find you not guilty.”
https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/traffic-tickets/speed-violations/texas-speeding-laws.htm
Thanks for the good info here. This happened 30 years ago, very late at night.
I was just running with the semi trucks so did not think I was pushing my luck. But stuff happens right?
8 over sounds like you were going too slow.
Pre-cell/GPS
Co-worker and I were working on a job at a town on the boarder with Mexico. I’m been going to Mexico for most my life, and told him we should go across the border for dinner. It’d be good and cost a lot less, I told him. We headed across the border just before sunset in search for a restaurant. We ended up going thru neighborhoods and couldn’t find a main street to get back on, to get our bearings. We came upon one 4 way stop and it had the Federales at it blocking off everything off. My co-worker starts freaking out. They start questioning us. Handcuffs are put on. I keep telling them we just came across for dinner. 3 or 4 different Federales come and go. Then the local cop comes up and asks questions. I told him the same thing, we’re just looking for some good food for dinner. He walks back to the group of Federales, talks awhile to them. Comes back and removes the cuffs. He says, you just drove into a drug sting operation!! The Federales were about to take you to jail. Follow me and I will take you to a great place to eat, but then you’ll have to driver directly back across the border. My co-worker never step foot in Mexico again LOL
I drove from southeastern Virginia up to the Poconos to retrieve my daughter from camp in a 2004 Ford Focus sedan that we kept as an extra car/beater. Part way into the trip, it started making that telltale clicking noise that comes with either a bad CV joint or wheel bearing. At the time, we were still orthodox Jews (conservative now), so if we stopped to get the car fixed (it was Friday), we would end up stuck wherever we were through Saturday night.
So, we agreed to just go for it. I really didn’t care of the car made it. I probably should have found a shop and had them fix it, or even grabbed the part at a store and done the wrenching, but I said “Let’s go for it. If we make it, cool. If we don’t, we’ll have the the Focus carcass towed and we’ll find a place to stay the night.
We made it. So, I guess it was uneventful. It turned out to be a wheel bearing, so I suppose that was pretty dumb on my part as the wheel could have flown off the car during the trip. Mostly a nice drive tho.
Those wheel bearings can actually get red hot, melt and cause the right front wheel to flop around like a politician trying to avoid a sound byte. Ask me how I know precisely how this can happen on a XJ Jeep in the Rockies when you decide to just make it to camp. Fun times.
It was a grand trip, but I’ll never forget the rising tension of watching the Range figure rapidly descend on our ascent south through the mountains outside of Santa Barbara, on a hot day with a sleep-deprived youngster finally napping the backseat. In panicked whispers we discovered that with no cell signal we had no idea how much further it would be until we hit a gas station, so had to dare to kill the AC–of course keeping up the windows to reduce drag. Our sweatbox finally crested the last hill and we dropped the windows and coasted in neutral down the other side into town where we slid on fumes into the first gas station we saw, price be damned. We never since set out on any unknown voyage without a plan for the next refuel, lesson learned!
My Dad was driving my mom, dog, and I through the middle of nowhere northern California when there was an RV going way under the speed limit, so my dad went to pass them, halfway through passing them it went from passing lane to double yellow and my dad continued to pass. 5-15 minutes later cops come flying up our ass, pull us over, put my dad’s face up against the hood of his car in like 100° heat, and arrested him. They gave him every charge they could think of including child endangerment. At his court date he was the only one in the court room besides the lawyers who was wearing a suit. As soon as his lawyer asked for the files on the arresting officers they dropped all charges.
Apparently it was one of those towns that once the gold mining went away all other business basically dried up, so the cops had their own racket where they’d just ticket everyone because they could, hoping the out of state and in state far away drivers wouldn’t show up to fight their tickets, and any locals caught in the crossfire could get fucked. Best we can assume is that the guy in the RV was some local with a lot of pull
It took like half a year for the arrest to be expunged from his record.
So your dad continued his pass of a slow RV by using the opposite lane?! That doesn’t justify the harshness of the cops did but if he was driving in the opposite lane that is dangerous AF and worthy of a stop regardless of the reason.
“Best we can assume is that the guy in the RV was some local with a lot of pull”
Why? It doesn’t sound like the RV driver did anything wrong. He’s only obligated to pull over if there is no passing lane which you say there was.
The passing occurred fairly quickly, we were not in a dog of an automobile, and there was not only no oncoming traffic and there was good visibility. It was a dotted line on a single lane rode, so he was in the opposite lane legally when it went to double yellow half way through passing.
The question of the RV driver is who he was. How were cops that had not seen ANY of what transpired were to learn of what transpired? At the time my father was pulled over and arrested he was not doing anything warranting an arrest. This occurred 5-15 minutes after the passing occurred, then cops come flying up on his ass out of nowhere. We didn’t pass them while parked, they drove to catch us with the reds and blues.
Maybe I’m naive and the RV driver just call 911, they determined a car passing an RV is an arrestable offense, and it’s worth sending cops after my father and insodoing breaking the speed limit to catch him because the cops were behind him so far back that they were
1.) Not able to witness any of what happened that supposedly warranted the arrest.
and
2.) catching up to my father traveling the same direction as him. If they were going the same speed as my father they wouldn’t have caught him.
But them dropping ALL the charges they tried to pin on my father after his lawyer asked for the files on the arresting officers seems pretty damn suspicious.
I wasn’t there so I can only spitball. If you still had the paperwork from the arrest you might be able to go through the citations and deduce something. You might be dead on with your theory about a shakedown but roughing up your dad seems really over the top, especially in front of witnesses, doubly so in front of his family.
Could a politically connected RV driver have called 911 to report being passed a maniac? That would assume adequate cell coverage, never a sure thing in the rural areas and that there was an available cop very nearby, also never a sure thing and that the cop was stupid enough to risk a punishing civil lawsuit for a non prosecutable case. Even without witnesses there may have been a dash cam in the patrol car or a body cam. A case consisting of no video evidence of a violation but a clear video of a cop roughing up a suspect in front of his family is I think a very good reason to drop the case as quickly as possible.
Maybe you’re right though and the RV driver was the local chief of police, judge or mayor. Full on conspiracy theory? A bait car in a sting with a police radio as well as cameras that recorded the whole thing but the gravity of the officer’s actions soured the case.
My point is unless the cops were looking to beat up and arrest someone and we were the first car they happened upon (unlikely).
Or unless we call the cops on ourselves.
With no cameras to witness the passing.
Then by process of elemination the RV is the only one who could have told the cops anything happened. Then the question that pops up is why would cops trust a random RV driver or passenger’s on the phone testimony enough to arrest someone?
Which leads me to the most likely outcome which was something the RV driver or an RV passenger communicated to the cops became the basis for the arrest, but the RV was nowhere to be seen at the time of arrest, and it was the last car we passed.
Maybe we just pissed off a Karen in said RV and they made false claims to the 911 operater that were wild enough to get the cops to speed to catch a car they hadn’t previously seen and give my dad the special treatment, one would hope the cops would be better at their jobs than that, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t breathalyze my dad (he doesn’t drink) at the time nor did they have him do a field sobriety test. So if someone in the RV said a drunk driver passed me then wouldn’t a breathalyzer and or field sobriety test be the first thing you do as an officer?
I’ve told this beforee, but I road tripped my buddy’s worn-out handicapped van from Connecticut to Florida solo one time, stopping for the night in Rocky Mount. Between the hand controls, the zero-effort steering, the wonky electrics and the broken fuel gauge, it was not exactly the most relaxing trip down I-95 to I-4 and across the state.
When I bought my 01 XJ in Boulder, CO, I drove it all the way back to Houston in one shot. Colorado sellers keep the license plates, so I had no plates on the car. Amazingly never got pulled over. I remember Kansas taking way longer than I thought it would, and only getting out of the car to put gas in it, use the restroom, or feed myself/get coffee. Took me 21 hours to get home. I slept for almost the entire next day. Trip went pretty well, but 10 years later I know I couldn’t do it that way.