I sometimes think of my old car when I pass the Walmart Supercenter. The parking lot there was essentially the starting point for my first real long-distance road trip as an adult, spanning ten days and eight states in the late spring of 2004. We were driving my 1996 Pontiac Grand Am GT, a car that my friend Nick told him he would “never buy a two-door car.”
I didn't keep a journal of the trip, but I believe Nick said this while standing at Watchman Campground in Zion National Park, perhaps our eighth day of battling to get in and out equipment in the rear seats of the car. We couldn't use the trunk because it was filled with everything I could justify bringing from my grad school apartment in Missoula, Montana, to our terminal in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I was moving with my then girlfriend. We tried to keep what we needed in the back seat, and of course, to get to anything in the back seat, we had to fold the front seat down, lean over, and lean into the corner.
I believe this type of two-door design was, and perhaps still is, called a “coupe”, a word that is almost never associated with the word “adventure”, which is what we were trying to use the Grand Am for ., and certainly not the word “dirtbag”, which is the type of adventure we were trying to have.
We left Missoula about 10 days before Memorial Day. Nick arrived by bus via Greyhound from somewhere in Iowa, an 18-hour trip he would probably never make again. So a car, any car, a space he would only have to share with one person, was probably an improvement.
I bought the car through Chris, my college roommate, whose brother, Andy, bought it at auction, fixed the only problem (someone tried to steal the side airbag). passenger), then sold it to me. There were several reasons why it wasn't the ideal car for road trips, some of which were my fault.
I had the trunk filled almost full by the time Nick added his stuff, then attached a trunk-mounted Yakima bike rack to haul an old Schwinn mountain bike to Arizona, so if one of We wanted something in the trunk, we had to remove the bike, remove the bike rack, then open the trunk. The bike and rack, of course, fell out of the back of the car several times on bumpy mountain roads, first on our way up and down to the Mt. Trailhead. Pilchuk outside Seattle. The summit was in a cloud when we reached the end of our short, steep hike.
People sleep in all kinds of adventure vehicles: old pickup trucks, new Sprinter vans, campers, trucks with sunroofs, trucks with campers, station wagons, and even in sedans with seats rear fold down. The Grand Am's seats did not fold down. And we couldn't recline the front seats much because of all our stuff in the back seat. Yet we slept in the car twice, because we were young and resilient, and had no other options, once at the ocean, somewhere near Aberdeen, in the Washington State, and once near Barstow, California, where we had driven after climbing Half Dome. and being unable to find a campsite near the park.
We camped almost every other night, except for a few nights we spent at friends' houses in Seattle and Bend. The trunk light melted a hole in Nick's Therm-a-Rest on the penultimate day of the trip, so he slept rather uncomfortably on our last night at Mexican Hat, in Utah. We had walked into the ranger station at Natural Bridges National Monument late in the afternoon and asked about the campsites, and in an I-I-swear-this-is-this exchange. is this actually happened that I've written about elsewhere, it's so stupid it looks like I made the ranger say, “You guys don't want to camp here.” You'll be done with this park in an hour. I'll tell you: are you intense? »
I looked at Nick, shrugged and nodded. We were young, quite fit and perhaps looked rather intense, I suppose. The ranger then told us to head south toward Valley of the Gods, all of which was BLM land, and we could just pull off the road and camp wherever we found a spot. We thanked him for the advice and left. I was unlocking the car door in the parking lot when I realized what he had actually said. On the roof of the car, I said to Nick:
“Oh, he meant 'in tents,' like we camped in tents or had a camper.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, not understanding my confusion.
The Grand Am's low clearance meant we didn't get too far into the Valley of the Gods before chickening out and returning to the paved highway, and spending the night at a paid campground behind a lodge at Mexican Hat . It wasn't that intense. The next day we drove through Monument Valley, visited the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and gave the car a well-deserved rest in a visitor parking spot at my girlfriend's Scottsdale apartment complex after the greatest adventure ever. she ever lived. .
To be honest, I didn't buy the car under the guise of it being a “road trip vehicle” or an “adventure vehicle.” I bought it because it was a great deal, from a trusted friend, and I wasn't very picky about cars. And I didn't treat it very well – I bought it in 1999, if memory serves, and I've been sober since March 2002, but the period in between was a little hard on the car. The inoperable driver's side window was my fault (had rolled it down when it was covered in ice), as was the problem with the right front wheel (hit a curb at high speed). The windshield had been smashed once (a friend had tried to jump over the car as we were leaving a party; I eventually had it repaired), and the trunk-mounted CD player had been smashed by a full beer keg that had rolled around in it (on the way back to our party).
Still, it was what I had, and entering the job market in 2004 with a graduate degree in journalism, I wasn't really ready to put a down payment on a new BMW. Or any car, really. I worked in the Phoenix area for a year, then moved to Denver, where the Grand Am was even less useful because of the snow, you know.
Luckily, Nick, who lived in Denver, had purchased a 2004 Toyota Tacoma and was willing to drive to Summit County ski resorts in the winter and mountain trailheads all summer. One winter day, however, I drove to Rocky Mountain National Park to snowshoe and met a guy my age who was also from the Midwest. We talked all the way to the parking lot and when I pulled up behind the Grand Am, he asked me, “Is that your car?”
I said, “Yeah. It's kind of a Midwestern car.
He said, “It’s some kind of meth car.” »
I wasn't going to defend the Grand Am's honor. I mean, its overall aesthetic didn't exactly scream “NOT a meth car,” but it never really let me down, at least not in the least. important way. And although we never drove my car to a trailhead if there was a questionable dirt road, I thought about the day the previous summer when we took Nick's Tacoma to climb Grays and Torreys peaks. The road to the trailhead was rough, with bumps, holes, and large exposed rocks, and I was glad Nick volunteered to drive his truck.
But then, about a half mile from the trailhead, the Jeep in front of us slowed down, and in front of the Jeep was someone in a Honda Civic negotiating a very tricky spot for a sedan on the road, backing up, redirecting, moving forward , back up again, then send it out, without any scratches. The Civic made it to the trailhead just fine. I lived in Colorado for 15 years and learned that any time you think a forest service road is impassable for anyone without high clearance and 4 wheel drive, you will always find that someone has succeeded to get to the parking lot. zone in a damn Honda Civic.
The Grand Am survived our 10-day, eight-state road trip and saw its share of national parks and plenty of Forest Service roads, but it was never my first choice if someone else was up for it to drive your vehicle for a day of hiking or skiing. One night in February 2006, I was walking up Josephine Street in Denver with my then-girlfriend, and a guy ran over her from a stop sign on 5th Avenue, only seeing us when his car slammed into the side front passenger of the Grand Am at full speed. We slammed into a light pole on the corner, hard enough to bend it, but not hard enough to knock it over. Right after we stopped, I looked at my girlfriend and asked, “Are you okay?” She said yes, she thought she was fine. A few seconds later, I said quietly but excitedly, “I think the car is totally destroyed.” » The destruction of the car, of course, being the only way for me to replace it, with my salary of $25,000/year at the newspaper. As soon as the insurance money came in, I found a 1996 Subaru Impreza Outback with all-wheel drive on Craigslist. I thought it could take me anywhere I wanted to go, and it did.
The Grand Am didn't suit the lifestyle I wanted at the time: I couldn't wait to see the world, and the world I wanted to see didn't have easy roads leading to it. It was a piece of equipment that didn't work very well. But when I started out, nothing I had was very good: cotton pants, bulky hiking boots, cheap backpacks that didn't fit me, a heavy sleeping bag, Cheapest climbing shoes I could find, a snowboard from a thrift store. pants.
Would better equipment have been nice? Of course. But I'm glad I didn't let that stop me from going.
