This was the original query that we started out to answer, and second “How long did it take you?” is the question that has been asked us more often than any other.
Interpreting “comfort” as really meaning “luxury,” you can go, so far as roads are concerned, only to Pueblo. So far as high-class hotels are concerned, there are two inhospitable distances. The first from Omaha, Nebraska, to Cheyenne, Wyoming; the second between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Winslow, Arizona, over three hundred miles.[7] Between Ash Fork, Arizona, and Needles, California, the distance is one hundred and ninety-one miles, which over those roads is a long distance, but perfectly possible to make in a day. Also it is by no means necessary to motor across any of these sections, unless you choose to. Putting a machine on a freight train is a very different matter from putting it on a boat and shipping it to Europe. In the latter case, you have to have a crate made as big and clumsy as a small house; then there are always delays and complications about catching boats, and altogether it is something of an ordeal. But to send a motor across our own country, for as short or as long a distance as you please, is very simple. You have only to drive it to the railroad station, roll it on an automobile freight car with a door at the end, as in a small garage, take the next passenger train yourself and skip as many or as few miles as you choose. In America, automobile freight is wonderfully efficient, and is about as fast as ordinary express. (At least the Santa Fé service is.)
We spent only two days at the Grand Canyon and the car arrived in Los Angeles at the same time we did. There is only one deterrent to frequent freight shipments: the cost. Automobiles weigh a good deal and the freight charges are by the pound. From Winslow, Arizona, to Los Angeles—a distance of 613 miles—costs $151.20 for a car weighing 4,000 pounds. A 2,000-pound car would cost, of course, exactly half that amount. If you don’t want to go into the desert where hotels are great distances apart and roads are not the smoothest in the world, a 3,000-pound car costs $133.20 from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Barstow, California, after which there are plenty of good hotels and beautiful California roads. The above freight rates will be of interest to very few, as except in case of accident or some unseen conditions no one who can help it, will want to see their car, housed like a lonesome and abandoned dog, on a freight. If it is a very crippled car, that is different; it is more like leaving it in a nice cot in a hospital, where it can’t get hurt any more.
But on the subject of cross-continent freight, by which many people may want to ship their cars home, the Transcontinental Freight Company’s offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, etc., have a special rate for through shipment of automobiles that is a very good thing to know about. They ship three automobiles in one freight car, and for cars weighing 4,500 pounds and over, they charge a maximum rate of $225.00, or $5.50 a hundred pounds, from New York to San Francisco or vice versa. A car weighing 3,000 pounds would cost $165.00.
The sole objection to this consolidated car load shipment is that they only send out the cars when they have three auto consignments, and you may have to wait a few days for the other two car spaces to be filled. Also their service is only between the most important terminal points. If you live somewhere in the middle distance between these terminal cities, it might be cheaper, as well as more convenient, to ship by regular railroad freight.
SOME DAY
Some day we are going back. Celia, E. M., and I have planned it. We must have plenty of time, and take our whole families with us, so that she will not have to hurry home to a husband, and I will not have to rush on without pause, in order to get home to a younger son. When we go again, we are going in two cars—one to help the other in case of need, and, if possible, a third car to carry a camping outfit—and camp! Celia and I both hate camping, so this proves the change that can come over you as you go out into the West. I say “out into,” because I don’t in the least mean being tunneled through on a limited train! The steel-walled Pullman carefully preserves for you the attitude you started with. Plunging into an uninhabited land is not unlike plunging into the surf. A first shock! To which you quickly become accustomed, and find invigoratingly delicious. Why difficulties seem to disappear; and why that magic land leaves you afterwards with a persistent longing to go back, I can’t explain; I only know that it is true.
The taste we had of the desert has something so appealing in the reminiscence of its harsh immensity by day, its velvet mystery at night—if only we might have gone further into it! We couldn’t then and now it is lost to us, three thousand miles away!
[2] One of the lovely white ones is the Garfield house, where the President’s widow still lives.
[4] Since writing the above, the Union Pacific Hotel has unfortunately burned down—and still more unfortunately for tourists, the railroad is not building another, and will run a restaurant only.
[6] Only dinner and lunch we had in hotel.