For the benefit of those who are planning such a trip and in answer to the many questions that have been asked us since our return, we have compiled the following pages:
The subject of car equipment, driving suggestions, garage and road notes, I have left to E. M., who has written a part of this chapter.
At the end of the book is a small outline map of the United States and the route we took marked on it with divisions, each indicating a day’s run. On separate pages are enlarged, detailed diagrams of these divisions, drawn to uniform scale, giving general road surfaces, points of historical or topographical interest along the road, and thumbnail outlines that suggest the types and relative sizes of the hotels they represent. Each little symbol means a modernly, even a luxuriously equipped house; good food, good rooms and private baths. The mileage between all these best hotels is clearly indicated, so that a tourist can plan the distance he likes to run at a glance.
East of the Mississippi there are plenty of high-class hotels, and although fine ones are building in every state of our country, in many sections of the West those dependent upon luxuries will still have to go occasionally long distances a day to get them.
From New York to San Francisco, by way of the Rocky Mountains and Los Angeles, is about 4,250 miles; which divides itself into about four weeks’ straight running, including the side trips to the Grand Canyon, to San Diego and Monterey, but not including extra days to stop over. To make it in less would be pretty strenuous, but perfectly feasible. Allowing no time out for sightseeing, accidents or weather delays, we arrived in San Francisco in four weeks’ running time, including the run to San Diego (two days), but we skipped a stretch of Arizona and Southeastern California, a distance that would have taken about three days, which would have made our own entire distance time twenty-nine days.
Some days we drove thirteen or fourteen hours, others we drove only three or four. We never ran on schedule, but went on further or stayed where we were as we happened to feel like it, excepting, of course, our one breakdown and the two times we were held over by rain. When roads were good and the country deserted, we went fast, but the highest the speedometer ever went for any length of time in the most uninhabited stretches was fifty miles an hour. At others it fell to six! For long, long distances, on account of the speed laws or road surfaces, we traveled at eighteen to twenty. Between thirty-five and forty is the car’s easiest pace where surface and traffic conditions allow. East of Omaha we were never many hours a day on the road. Between Omaha and Cheyenne, and again between Albuquerque and Winslow, finding no stopping places that tempted, we drove on very long and far.
TO THE MAN WHO DRIVES
By E. M. Post, Jr.
If I were starting again for the West, I should want an American car. A new car of almost any standard American make would be better for such a trip than the best foreign one.
In the first place, our own cars have sufficient clearance—ten inches. In the second place, spare parts are easy to get. Especially is this true of the moderate priced cars, which are sold in such large numbers that even the small country garages must carry supplies for them. But the important advantage is sufficient height. There are many places, particularly in New Mexico and Arizona, where with a low car you will have to fill in ruts so that your center can clear the middle of the road; and you will have to pile earth and stones on the slopes of some of the railroad crossings, so as not to “hang up” on the tracks.
Beyond the state of Colorado, which has magnificent mountain roads, if your car is a foreign one, you should have extra-sized wheels put on it to lift the frame high enough. Of course, you can get through, by destroying your comfort and temper, in road building, and jacking the machine over places impossible to pass otherwise, and arriving in a very battered condition in the end. Another qualification besides height in favor of an American car, is endurance. American manufacturers have solved the problem of building machinery that needs little care and can be jolted without injury, where the more complicated European machinery under like treatment goes to pieces.
With a foreign car you are furthermore at a disadvantage in using metric tire sizes. You can always get the standard American sizes, which in the tubes will fit your metric casings all right, and for that matter you could probably at a pinch and temporarily use a standard casing. Metric size can be found in such places as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but shoes have a way of exhausting themselves without regard to your position on the map.
At Los Angeles or San Francisco you can get your metric equipment for the return trip so that if you start with new tires all around and two spares, you should have no need of buying tires on the road. Mine are, according to average American equipment, way under size for the weight of my car, and my six shoes carried me through easily. In fact there was New York air in two of them when we arrived in San Francisco.
Sometimes We Struck a Bad Road
In the matter of what to carry: New tires, of course. For any but a very heavy car two spare shoes are plenty. Tubes you can buy anywhere. I only had five punctures all the way—and no blow-out. More than two extra shoes would be a hindrance because of their weight. A small shovel is sometimes convenient but not necessary east of New Mexico, and with a high car not necessary at all. African water bags are essential west of Albuquerque, but not before. Fifty or a hundred feet of thin rope may be very useful if you happen to strike mud or sand stretches, especially if two cars are making the trip together. In the way of spare parts, I should suggest a couple of spark plugs, extra valve and valve spring, fan belt, extra master links for a chain-drive car. Tire chains with extra heavy cross-pieces for all wheels are indispensable through the Middle West in case of rain. And see that the tools that have been “borrowed” from your tool kit have been replaced. Repairs on the road are aggravating enough, not to be made more so through lack of tools. Now that people carry spare rims and almost never seem to put in a new tube and pump it up on the road, they neglect to carry a pump and a spare tube, but if you should have three flat tires in one day, you will appreciate a spare tube and an old-fashioned tire pump that works!
I carried thirty-five gallons of gasoline in my tank, which gave me a radius of three hundred and fifty miles on a tank full, with which I was never in any danger of running short. I should say that a two hundred-mile radius would be plenty, except across the desert. You can buy it even there, but at about three or four times the regular rate. You may go many miles before you come to a hotel, but gasoline you can buy anywhere. Good shock absorbers all around will probably save you a broken spring or two. It will pay to look over your springs after each day’s run and if a leaf is broken, have a new one put in before attempting to go on.
In the Middle West, automobile associations or highway commissioners do magnificent work. Roads are splendidly sign posted, and in the dragged roads districts, the rain no sooner stops than the big four- and six-horse drags are out. Follow a rainstorm in a few hours, and you will find every road ahead of you as smooth as a new-swept floor. Hence for the patient motorist, who can spare the time, there is always an eventual moment when there are good roads.
A few of the bad roads of the Southwest are so rocky that you have literally to clamber over them, but about seventy per cent of the road across New Mexico and Arizona, in which I include the road across the Mohave Desert that I covered later, is a fair, and occasionally fast, natural road. The streams are generally easy to get through, and at those that are sandy or too deep, the automobile association keeps teams standing on purpose to see you through.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS ON DRIVING
Don’t try to drive from New York to San Francisco on high gear. You will often have used “first” by the time you strike the Rocky Mountains. Don’t, then, subject your bearings to an unnecessary strain by forcing your motor to labor as it must, if too steep a hill is taken on too high a gear. See that your hand brake can lock your wheels. On a five-mile grade one brake may burn out, and on most cars in this country the hand brake is next to worthless from lack of use and care. Letting the engine act as a brake is a good practice on long descents.
On going through sand or mud that looks as if it might stop you, change into a lower gear and don’t lose your forward momentum. It is easier to keep a car going than to start it again. Fording through streams instead of crossing on bridges is common in the Southwest and many of the streams have bottoms of quicksand character. Before fording a stream make sure that the water is not going to come above the height of your carburetor. Then start and stay in first until you are out on the other side. The idea is to go through at a constant speed with no jerk on the wheels.
In high altitude your carburetor will need more air, as there is less oxygen in a given volume of atmosphere than at sea-level. This means also that a gasoline motor has considerably less power in Colorado than at sea-level. Don’t be discouraged and think your car is failing you when you find that you have to crawl up a long hill in “second,” upon which you think you ought to “pick up” on “high.” Not only is your motor less powerful than at home, but the hill is steeper than it looks. When you get back to sea-level it will run as well as ever.
The hardest thing for a stranger to guess seven or eight thousand feet up in the air, is height, grade or distance. You see a little hill, a nice little gentle incline about half a mile long at most; then gradually from the elevation of your own radiator out in front of you, you get some idea of the steepness of grade and you find from your speedometer when you get to the top, that it was a short little stretch of three miles.
One other point: on high altitudes you will have to fill your radiator often. Water boils more quickly, and this added to the long stiff grades, will cause a lot of your cooling water to waste in steam—even in a car that at normal altitude never overheats.
In Order to Cross Here E. M. Built a Bridge with the Logs at the Right
REPAIR WORK ON THE ROAD
You will find a few garages anxious to please, beautifully equipped and capable of the finest work. The garages of Europe are not to be compared with our best ones. Garage equipment of the newest is to be found frequently, and all the way across the continent. The greater majority of garages are neither good nor bad; and again a few—a very few only—are incompetent, careless and lazy, the men having the attitude that they are doing you a favor in robbing you.
If you know enough about your car to do your own repairing, or know what should be done well enough to superintend others, you will have no trouble. Furthermore, if you actually oversee everything that is done—you know that your car is all right and you don’t have to hope that nothing has been forgotten by a man who knows that he is not going to be the one to suffer if his work is not what it should be. Also you know your car’s weaknesses and in driving can save them. I find garage men who take pride in their garages, glad and willing to serve an owner who takes that much interest in his machine.
On rare occasions, a first-class man resents your persistent superintendence, as though it were a slur on his ability or good intentions. There was a case in the Marksheffel garage in Colorado Springs—it was one of the best, by the way, that I have ever encountered. The car had been driven over 30,000 miles without ever being taken down, and without other care than my own. And before going into such an uninhabited country as the desert, there were several parts that I thought it safer to put in new.
Taking the crank case off and fitting new gaskets, two men worked on it until late into the night. I did not do any work myself this time, but stood watching the men, so interested in the efficient way they were doing the job, that I was unconsciously silent. At the end of about two hours, one of them burst out with:
“I guess you’ve had some pretty tough experience with dishonest garages—is that it?”
“No,” I told him, “that was not it, but that I always wanted to know the exact condition of my engine. Otherwise I might get into serious trouble on the road somewhere.” The situation being thus explained, his former resentment melted entirely, and a few hours later we parted warm friends.
In the case of this particular garage, as well as those whose names are listed in the garage expense accounts (pages 260-277), you can certainly leave the repairs to them, unless your engine is to you what a favorite horse is to a lover of animals—something whose welfare you do not want for a moment to be in doubt about.
On the whole, to a man who has had any driving experience at all, and who chooses a proper car, most particularly if it is a new one, the trip will not present any difficulties. And the experiences he may have will prove an incomparable school for his driving and for his ability to tackle new problems with the means at hand.