Throwaway Road Trip

Perhaps more impressive than my maneuver to skirt the rear of the Accord while at speed was the Super Duty Ford to my left, door-to-door with me on the freeway when the Honda's idiot chose to tempt death. The driver of the Ford truck managed to jump the big thing's ample brakes and follow my line around the Honda. Wow. His horn wasn't as loud as mine, though.

Matt and Carla Knot It Up
My omnipresent girlfriend and I were northbound from San Diego to Carmel By-The-Sea for a wedding. Nice place for a wedding, if you like $6 draft beers, $200 a night hotel rooms and so much pretense that the zits on your back qualify as multi-dwelling real estate. To be honest, the wedding was well done and delightful. Remember the story about how friends will help you move, but real friends will help you move bodies? I got to do that as the groom's toast. I also found a killer bottle of barbeque sauce at a local meat market.


We had to get there first. Choosing the road less traveled requires faith in self and in vehicle. Myself, no worries, I've been stranded in Baja, Mexico with nothing but enough Spanish to get me stabbed. But the trucklet—a '98 Toyota Rav4 I bought to motor around SoCal and haul my boy to preschool—was never meant to do the long haul. Driving it more than 100 miles at a time wasn't even a part of the thought process.


Comments from the contemporary media, when they're not too busy bending over to corporate marketing executives, invariably called the first-gen Rav4 composed but slow. Fun to drive for an overgrown Corolla wagon. Useful. Slow. Well made in the Toyota tradition. Slow? The little thing had acquitted itself nicely since I dropped five large on it, every mile a validation of Toyota's product. No problems, every repair one of those predictable things: a fuel filter here, a bushing there. Readily adaptable to modification and late night garage silliness. No complaints. Why not try a road trip? It'll hold together going reasonably short distances, so if I treat it to the same gentle abuse it sees every day, why can't it bang out a day's drive?


Northbound on the 5 through Los Angeles, with nothing but a headwind for trouble through the Grapevine, Kelly and I selected that less traveled path. Instead of taking the 46 west through oil-soaked Lost Hills, we turned left for Maricopa via the 166. Backwoods California is quite a visual treat, if desolate. Old farming communities forgotten, homes of the rich stuffed here and there into hidden valleys, silent fields and history just laying about, plus some really charming two-lane driving. It only added an hour to our run. Off the 166 we took the 101 toward San Fran, and it was on that old road somewhere north of Atascadero State Prison where we skirted the freeway and death in one easy step.


Our little bomber did not disappoint. You need to get a throwaway trucklet for yourself. Home without so much as a sneeze (though I think the fuel pump is going away—the plugs are starting to look awfully white), I turned around and drove to Las Vegas. The same day. Trucklet, Ho!