Day 1

We got up around 6:30 and went to pack the car, but ran into a slight issue. Masterchef brought a lot more stuff than I did, since he not only had the nice DSLR we shot most of these stills on, but a bunch of video gear as well (youtube movie coming hopefully soon), and as such, not everything would fit in the trunk. The solution? Put the spare on the roof!



Everything fit in the trunk perfectly after we made that decision.

Leaving LA was relatively uneventful, and we only made one stop at Target to get a blanket, some emergency food and water, and glow sticks. Why glow sticks? We needed a way to see the instruments at night, and they're a convenient size to wedge into the dash board.

As we got further from the city, we started gaining altitude, the temperature (coolant and air) got hotter and hotter, and Route 66 stopped just being another maintained, well used road, and started looking like this:

The constant bumps had the Maverick's trim rattling everywhere, the outside air temp was around 110F, and our coolant temp was getting alarmingly high, but we were finally really out on Route 66, this was what we were here for!

It's worth mentioning at this point that the AC didn't work, not even a little bit. We only planned to make one stop out in the Mojave, for fuel, but the Maverick had other plans. Maybe an hour after our fuel stop, the contant high-temperature high-altitude climb took its' toll, and with the coolant temp creeping above 250, I pulled off and shut the car down. The car puked brown coolant out of the vodka bottle for a solid 10 minutes.

We let the car cool for about 30 minutes, maybe more, giving us plenty of time for more pictures. There are certainly worse places to overheat, at least it was pretty.

Note the lovely brown color from the coolantsplosion all over the fender. At some point, a man in an F150 pulled over and asked if we needed water- we thanked him and said we were fine, and as he drove off, he said "I did it for Jesus!". Now, obviously, this water was for our engine, so from that point forth, our engine was named Jesus. But it didn't sound like Jesus, so we named our exhaust Richard Nixon.

Having topped up the water and finished debating the names of the Maverick's components, I turned the key, hoping we hadn't hurt anything. Jesus came to life immediately, Nixon barking triumph into the desert, and we continued onward to Arizona. On the way out of California, we saw what happens when you have construction on the only major road through a desert with no exits and no detours- thankfully it was all going the other way, but imagine being stuck in that with no A/C when it's 110 out!

Arizona

California had been good to us, no issues with police, only one (completely predictable) overheat, and a beautiful desert landscape. But as we entered Arizona, all of that was put to shame. The Western Arizona section of 66 is everything you could want from a trip like this- if you only ever get a chance to drive one section of 66, make it this one.

This is what Arizona 66 looks like near the border:

We drove maybe 5 miles of that before arriving in Oatman, a town populated by a large number of donkeys (and probably some humans but I honestly couldn't tell). Not sure why I can't find a picture of them, but it's probably because we were too busy filming as about 6 donkeys walked right up to the car, sticking their heads in and generally mooching for food. Masterchef embarassed himself by loudly proclaiming that they were goats before we got close enough to clearly see that they were not. It was awesome.

We then drove out of Oatman into (onto?) Sitgreaves pass. 30 miles or so of incredible scenery, and roads which, when driven at the speed limit in a '77 Maverick, result in tire squeal, body roll, and just an excellent time all around.

These roads took their toll, however. The car developed a miss and generally ran like crap at anything but WOT. No problem, with 88hp on tap WOT was the name of the game. We stopped for dinner at some place that had our car on the menu:

After dinner, with a glow stick ziptied to the instruments and the car misfiring constantly, things got a lot more boring- the roads became straight, and dumb Burma Shave ads became a regular occurrence. It was pretty cool to pace the massive freight trains running on the tracks adjacent to 66, though.

At one point, we came upon a large rabbit sitting in the road. I drove around him, not slowing much since he was completely motionless, but when we were maybe 10 feet away, he made a huge corkscrewing jump right into the bumper. We decided to name him Goose, since he died from ejecting and we weren't sure if it was Maverick's fault. RIP Goose.

At maybe 11 PM, we were getting tired and were close to where we wanted to sleep. A truck began tailgating us, and despite varying our pace a bit, he wouldn't back off or pass. After maybe 3 minutes of that, the red and blue lights came on- he'd run our plates. We weren't sure of the legitimacy of the plates on the car, they had a current registration sticker, but the seller had referred to them as "outlaw plates" so we didn't really have a warm fuzzy feeling. Luckily, the officer was very understanding, told us we were supposed to have bought transit plates in CA, but there was nothing we could do now that we were out of state, and sent us on our way.

It getting was really late, and we were looking for a suitable spot to sleep in the car. We were relatively close to our destination for tomorrow, the misfire was getting even worse, and we had driven around a campground but couldn't find anywhere to put the car. I was getting annoyed and generally being an shiny happy person, and we were having no luck finding a good spot, so eventually I just pulled off the road and declared we'd sleep there.

That lasted all of an hour before a nice police officer knocked on our window and informed us that we were going to get robbed if we slept there. He had us move to the gas station a couple miles away, and we spent the rest of the night there, listening to coyotes howling in the distance.