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Offline Wilbur

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Road Trip
« on: November 13, 2015, 04:39:03 PM »
So this is just a story but it was a fun little trip just the same. Some years ago I was working in CO roofing houses. One of my roomates (3 of us all lived together and worked roofing) had a little Subaru Sambar van. This was a pretty cool novelty of a vehicle with suicide doors and nothing, I mean nothing at all in front of your feet/legs than the sheet tin it was made out of. I forget the year but it was a 60's or early 70's model. It had something like 13" tires. The easy part was that once we had a flat and I could just tip the van by hand onto the other two wheels while he changed the flat. Road worthy? Just BARELY!

Here's what it looked like (this one is not his but found the pic searching), his was white but same basic vehicle:



Now this thing had a little lawnmower engine or something powering it so take the aerodynamic shape of a refrigerator box, put the COG up high (any time a person was in it), put it on little tiny tires and give it no power. Perfect right?  ::)

Anyway....this vehicle was down in the Arkansas River Valley of CO (east of Pueblo)....problem was we were up in Greeley which is north central, about 200 miles away. But no worries we want this thing for running around town, going to work sites, its a cool machine to tool around in, as long as you are in town. So we take a ride down south. My roommate is going to leave his pickup there for a couple of weeks and we will go back and get it later. So we first go through it and get it fired up. I think "going through it" meant making sure the hamster wheel had grease. But it fired up, we filled it up and headed off.

Now the route from that part of CO to Greeley goes straight north on a state road. CO 71. It runs north up to Limon where you can pick up I-70. This is through rural eastern CO. To say there is not much out there is an understatement. but no worries. We had food, we had water, we may have had a beer or two in case we got stranded. But we weren't drinking cause we really didn't know how long it would take. This thing does maybe 45 mph down a hill, off a cliff, with a tail wind. Anything else and you're hard pressed to get it above 35. So we head out at about 8 PM or so with the summer sun setting. 

Now given that I don't think this thing has a suspension, a rough county road does what a rough county road will do....shakes you to death. Add to that the wind sweeping across the prairie hitting that sail of a side, we were being pushed this way and that way.....well we were pushed mostly right as the wind was from the west. Finally after about 2 hours we hit Punkin Center (yeah that's its name...no lie). It's simply a crossroads of two state roads. Its built up now looking at it on Google Earth but at the time there was only a small gas station on the northwest corner. Well we wheeled in there about 10:00 (uh oh....lessee...54 miles....2 hours....we have 150 miles to go.....Houston we have a problem! ha!). It was lit only with a streetlight as it closes at dark I think  ::). In the gravel parking lot was a semi with the driver checking his load. We come wheeling in, engine racing, gravel flying (think dukes of hazard on a ride on mower  :o) The driver stopped what he was doing to see what the he** was pulling in near him. I opened the door and yelled to him "Hey! How far is it to Montana?!" He almost fell over he was laughing so hard. Well we did what we had to (get rid of some liquid waste that had been shaken out of us by the road), fired back up, waved to the trucker and wheeled back out in a cloud of dust.

Well by this time we realized we had done some serious miscalculations....we knew at the rate we were going Greeley was going to be a good 6 hours more. But hell...no problem...we'll get there about sun-up.  ::) So we bounce rattle and shake for another 30 miles or so when we get to the real fun....the interstate. Now you've all seen those videos of guys who lost their licenses driving down the road on their lawnmowers. That's pretty much what we have here, except we're on the interstate. Fortunately with the rocket ship like speed we were travelling meant we got to the interstate at about 11:30PM or so. So very little traffic. Which was a good darn thing because between the wind blowing in our face, the wind from semi's passing us blowing us to the ditch, we were doing about 30 mph in the breakdown lane with the flashers on. Several times I asked my buddy if I should get out and push when we hit a hill. I am glad no cops were around they would have shot us and left us for dead for being on a highway with that thing.  ???

Fortunately we were only on the Interstate for about an hour as it was 53 miles.....wait a minute....in my dreams! It was 2 hours of misery....hoping the semi's could see our flashers....hoping we wouldn't get blown into their path by the wind and hoping we wouldn't get blown into the ditch when the blast of air hit us as they passed us. But we made it....got to another county road and got the heck off the darn highway! And by then we were almost home free....about 70 more miles of county roads.

We pulled into Greeley at 4AM. A neighbor was just getting up for work and came out to see our new toy. We both looked like we had been rode hard and put up wet. He said "where the heck have you guys been?" We told him we had been on the road since 8PM the night before. He just laughed and went to work. I will say that first beer we opened tasted mighty good. But we had our van. Strapped a ladder on it and threw on some signs we were GTG. It got us business I will say that! ha.

So that's my story....but I was darn glad I didn't have to take it BACK to southern CO.  ;D 


 

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