Reading/writing on this thread got me reminiscing about that 2002 trip. Except for the section following "Open Roads" when my wife joined me from Tahoe to Los Angeles I travelled alone, and not having much else to do I wrote email summaries of each day's travel which I shared to friends as well as posting to the autox.healey site. Looking at my emails for the couple of days when I was travelling on I-40/US 66 from LA to Albuquerque I see that I wrote the following:
Sunday July 7, 2002:
"After spending a few days with my son and daughter who both live in the Los "Angeles area I left this morning around 5:00 AM bound for Kingman, AZ. My "Desert Driving Plan", which served us so well in the Western states on the way out to Tahoe, is to be off the road by 12:00 noon, so I kept my day's drive down to about 330 miles.
"The first hour was spent just getting out of the LA environs, and the sun came up well before I changed from the I-10 to the I-15 and climbed out onto the San Bernardino Mountains. By the time I had reached Hespena the temps were already rising and I had peeled down to a tee-shirt, with my trusty red Austin-Healey visor pulled down low against the morning sun's rays.
"On up to Barstow and onto the I-40 running across the Mohave Desert "Historic Route 66", as it is called, runs intermittently alongside the Interstate and seems just a memory. In a few places near the freeway interchanges some old motels and food joints seem to be holding on, but mostly there are just signs and closed buildings. Given the desolate nature of the are and the high temperatures the wonder is not that businesses have disappeared but rather that they were established at all in the first place. I thought about the saga of the Oakies in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
"BTW I don't know how efficient the cooling systems were in early Corvettes but it is easy to understand why they did not use a Healey as the theme car in the "Route 66" TV series. As the morning wore on my car's water temperature gauge needle crept past 190, then stayed above 212 for the balance of the drive except after a long downgrade, and the inevitable climb that followed drove it up the peg on a few occasions. However, the car ran faultlessly, and provided I kept my speeds down to about 65 I could deal with things.
"The Santa Fe Railroad line paralleled 40/66 for much of the morning's run and as I slowly overtook some eastbound trains I counted the cars--the biggest had about 100 cars and three engines. It is amazing the amount of tire debris on and along the road and in places the shoulder almost seems to be in a state of total disrepair--fist-sized pieces of blacktop littered the road and occasionally were in the travel lanes. I stopped for fuel in Ludlow (the Third "Annual Pistachio Festival is coming up in November) and although an inviting loop of the old road (Here called the "Old National Trail") made off to the Southeast I thought it best to stick to the plan and stay on I-40 to beat the heat.
"The desert desolation was broken occasionally by 1950's-vintage trailers parked under a scrubby tree or two but there was not much to look at until the relative lushness of Needles, CA came shimmering out of the Mohave Valley which gets its green from what water Los Angeles chooses to let through and eventually finds its way to Lake Havasu further downstream, the unlikely home of the old London Bridge. I crossed into ZONA and ran the last 60 miles into Kingman, slowly decreasing my speed up long grades when the water temperature pegged out.
"I'm now ensconced in the local TravelLodge. The clerk told me that today was mild at a mere 95 degrees but she said ominously "Wait until later in the afternoon". That's it for the day--I'm off again tomorrow and perhaps I'll try to get on the road by 4:00 AM."
​I'll write up my notes from the next day's segment--Kingman to Albuquerque--tomorrow. Thanks for bearing with me.