Route 66 to Paso and so much more! (5649 miles on vinyl!!)

I did call you, Bro...a couple of times!!!

(Once when we were headed towards Vegas up 93 towards the Dam, and again from Boulder City that night.)

Ha Ha...I loved the weather and desert areas AROUND Las Vegas...I'm just not much for big cities I suppose!!

Sorry we missed ya, Man!!!

 

wait, wha...???

do you still have my number from before?

how the hell did i miss you???

 

We left Big Dog Burger and made the short drive through the neighborhood to Mojo Burger to find a bigger turn out at that cruise night. Here's just a sampling of what was on hand...

 

For a while (a few years back) it seemed like orange cars were EVERYWHERE, and it was easy to get tired of seeing them at times...but these two orange rides stole the show at the Mojo Burger cruise if you ask me! VERY cool!!!!

 

Ha Ha....I dunno...didjya check your voice mail or whatever?!?

 

Just as we were getting ready to leave the Mojo Burger cruise and roll back down to our room in Gilroy for the night, Denise (Hotrodladycruzr) and her entourage walked up to say "Hi". She had flown in from Detroit with ChevyGirlRox (aka Debbie Harry?! ) and Old Sign Bob to hit the cruise nights and tour some shops before driving down for the BIG show in Paso that weekend. After a brief rap session with the three of them, we motored off back to Gilroy to crash for the evening in preparation for the ride back down to Paso and San Luis Obispo on the following morning (Friday).

 

Day Twelve...

We spent a good few hours driving back south down Highway 101 to get to Paso Robles around lunch time and stopped to eat at a restaurant on the fringes of town. There were LOTS of cars in town already, and we enjoyed watching them cruise by on the main drag as we ate!

After lunch, we cruised around Paso Robles ourselves to scope out what was parked in some of the local motel parking lots and discovered a host of SUPER clean rides at the Budget Inn!!!

(The brownish Galaxie was my personal fave of this bunch...but ALL of them were just astounding!!!)

 

After a little cruise through Paso that afternoon, we drove on down to San Luis Obispo to grab the motel room we had reserved for Firday and Saturday night then thought we might go back UP to Paso to see what the Friday night activities were like, and to get our registration out of the way before 7pm at the library.

Little did we know, traffic was backed up for MILES on northbound Highway 101, and we got stuck right in the middle of it! It didn't take long for us to decide to take a quick exit and have dinner in Atascadaro while we waited for the congestion to clear up some.

After dinner, we finally made it up to Paso and got the registration chores handled just bfore the 7pm deadline and tried to join the cruise for a bit, but the hot temps and crawling traffic just made the old Chevy (and it's driver!) sweat a bit too much for my liking! We knew we'd see LOTS more cars bright and early the next morning, so we opted to bug out and go back to San Luis Obispo to turn in early to rest up for the big day ahead on Saturday!!!

 

Day Thirteen...

PASO!!!

This was IT...the BIG day! We were up at3:45am to get ready, eat something at Dennys, then drive up to Paso from San Luis Obispo to get in line. The morning air was COLD, which kept the motor cool as we followed the line of slowly moving rides into our corner of the park and took our spot. A heavy, cool fog drifted in for a while, making everything seem cold and damp...but in typical California fashion, it soon moved off and the sun burned through to create yet another day in Paradise! I wandered around for a bit talking to a few folks and taking pics with my own camera, while Cathy captured some incredible cars on hers!

Around mid-day, I happened to wander by the HAMB Meet & Greet area and got the chance to meet a few familiar names in person for the first time! Seeing all of you was a real treat, and I must thank Old Sign Bob for the very VERY cool stickers he brought to the event...that was a nice touch and very thoughtful! Thanks again, Man!

So...not much else needs to be said about Day Thirteen....lets bring on some of CathyH's fine photography!!

 

Some more from in the park...

 

Of course, not all the cars are in the park...part of the magic that IS Paso Robles is that the city itself is so picturesque and charming on it's own...so seeing some beautiful cars parked around town on the Big Day just adds to the whole wonder of it all!

(Hey, if nothing else, it allows for some cool pics!!)

 

Pop Stars and pink cars!!!!

 

After a long and wonderfull sunny day at the show, we headed back to our room, stopping off at a seafood place in Atascadaro for dinner first. We were both tired and a little worn out, but estatic that we had come all the way to Cali to see one hell of a fine show! There isn't much that compares to it...the ideal setting, the endless sea of fine machinery, and the unforgettable journey to get us there! We turned in early to rest up for the LONG drive back to Tulsa that would begin the next morning, and both agreed that this was a show well worth whatever it takes to make it there!!

 

Day Fourteen...

We packed up, ate at IHOP, then almost reluctantly rolled out of San Luis Obispo bright and early Sunday morning to get a jump on the long stretch back home. We took Highway 58 back through the twisty, turny mountain roads once more and then ran into Bakersfield to gas up at a cheap place we spotted motoring through town. The car was running kind of warm, but not too bad at that point, so we made pretty good time back through Tehachapi and onward towards a slight detour we had planned to take in Boron, California (thanks to a tip from Prime Mover!).

Most of the ride to Boron was just plane boring...

 

Once we took the Boron exit and started looking around...we began to get the feeling that we were getting real close to our destination..."The only service station (still open!) in Boron"!!!

 

Ah! There it was! Not too difficult to find in the bustling metropolis that IS Boron, California...but well worth the detour if you ever find yourself in the area...

 

Inside this inviting little station we found the HAMB's own Doc Frankenstein who was glad to spend an hour or so showing us around and just talking pleasantly with us as the car cooled of a couple hundred degrees!

 

The Good Doctor even showed us a sampling of the paint scheme he's planning to use on his funky fenderless Camino rod when it gets to that point...

 

After leaving Doc's hospitality, we rolled intow Barstow to get more gas and cool the car off again, and found this neat old Santa Fe caboose lurking next to the gas station.

 

The rest of the day involved a long, hot trek across scorching desert until we reached the Nevada state line around dusk. With the sun sunk outta site, we were able to press onward towards Las Vegas without any further boil-overs!

Arriving in Sin City, we filled the tank again and decided to press on while it was cool enough to avoid any overheating episodes. We had elected to go back along a slightly different route from Las Vegas to Tulsa...one that would take us NORTH through Utah, Colorado and Kansas where we hoped it would be cooler...and also so we could see a little different scenery along the highways leading us back to Oklahoma. The plan was to take Highway 15 up to I-70 and just head east to the 135 South out of Salina, Kansas down to the 35 South in Witchita to the 412 in Oklahoma. Sounded simple enough. We made it to St George, Utah late Sunday night and stopped for the evening there. It had been a LONG drive from San Luis Obispo that morning, and we were really tired!!!

 

Great post Fat Hack. I almost feel as if I were right there with you during the whole trip.

 

Ha Ha...I must be better at this than I thought, then!!!

 

Day Fifteen...

Utah is one beautiful state! I'd say it's the most incredibly scenic state out of all the ones we drove through on this trip! We got into St George very late on Sunday night...so it was dark and didn't look like much then...but come morning time when we loaded up and headed out along Highway 15, we got a look at Utah in the daytime and it was impressive!

By the time we picked up I-70 and started rolling East, it just got that much better. Passing through forest lands and into majestic mountain passes, canyons and naturally colorfull rocky backdrops made the drive simply unforgettable! Photos don't quite capture the full depth of just how wonderful this state is...and we were floored by it's inspirational wonder!

 

After passing through Utah, we rolled into Colorado and spotted another mural on a wall in the first town we sought out a motel in...

 

We ended up staying the night in Grand Junction, Colorado at what would end up being the dumpiest room we encountered on the whole trip! In our FIRST room there, the air conditioning didn't work, the sink ran constantly, both bedspreads had big cigarette burn holes in them (in non-smoking rooms!), the carpet was filthy and the room was WAY overpriced!

They moved us to the room next door which was only slightly better...but the air DID work in that room, and they gave us a $20 refund on the room, so we endured it for one night and made up our minds to move out quickly come the next morning!!

 

Day Sixteen...

We got outta Grand Junction in a fair hurry after adding a quart of transmission fluid to the car. We had picked up a quart of overpriced Penzoil brand trans fluid somewhere along the line when we ran out of the cheaper Wal-Mart brand stuff we had been using up until that point, but despite the reputation that Penzoil motor oil has, I figured trans fluid was trans fluid, so as long as it was the right TYPE, we oughtta be okay!

Well, as we got further along, we ran into one hell of a storm, complete with marble sized hail, freezing rain, high winds and the whole works! The windshield wipers picked this exact moment to quit working at random intervals, which made things like seeing the ROAD as we were trying to DRIVE all that much more difficult!

When we got further along towards Denver, the car started acting real strange, as if the transmission was messing up bad! To get up some of the steeper grades, I'd have the pedal on the floor and we'd only be managing 30mph at most in the worst areas! It was 31 degrees, snow was all around us, and the car was just flat outta 'oomph'!

I was stumped...I didn't know the elevation at that point, but we'd been over mountains in OTHER states along our journey and hadn't encountered any problems getting over them...so I began to fear transmission failure...and called DIRTYT to put out a call for help here on the HAMB!

As it turned out, we were pulled over at a Visitor Center one exit east of Silver Plume, Colorado, and when I asked the guy working the desk if there were any GOOD shops around, and he immediately gave me the personal number of a guy he called "Stormy", and said that he was the best around...and just one exit (two miles) back West in Silver Plume.

I called Stormy and knew right away I was dealing with a genuinely good guy. He gave me directions to his shop and I told him I'd try to get the car back UP there (Silver Plume was a two mile hump up a very steep grade from where we were!).

Long story shorter, we got the back up the incline to the Silver Plume exit and quickly found Stormy's shop. The guy isn't a HAMBer, but he oughtta be! Right out front he had a chopped 53 F100 and a 51 Chevy that belonged to his teenaged son!

Stormy listened to me describe what the car was doing, then took it for a test drive. He quickly assured us that we didn't have anything wrong except that the motor was just not tuned for the altitude that we were at....it ran fine, smooth and cool...but was WAY down on power due to the incredibly thin air! He said to shift it down manually and drive it hard to get up the grades, and that we'd be getting gradually lower in altitude as we went West towards Denver, and from there on out it would be smooth sailing!

 

We couldn't thank Stormy enough for his honest, friendly advice and the time he took to make sure that the altitude was all that was causing us our grief! He wouldn't take a penny in payment and told us that he ran Weiand superchargers on all of his cars because that's what it takes to get them to run at 9800 feet! We did take a moment to shoot some pics of his place and a couple of his cars before we drove back Eastward towards denver with the worst of our altitude problems behind us!

 

In The Trucking World Tucumcari Is Called ( 2 Canary's )

 

We made it to Denver and decided to stop for lunch/dinner at a place called McGrath's Fish House which proved to be an excellent choice! The food was great and the staff was among the best we ran across on our trip!

After our meal, we headed back out into the pouring rain and motored slowly East through the thick Denver freeway traffic until we got clear of the city limits and were able to pick up the pace a bit once more. I tried the AM radio again and picked up a station playing some real old stuff, which was kinda cool, and we kept on driving through high winds, lightning, rain, and even ice every now and then! As night fell, we decided to pull up for the evening in a little town called Flagler, Colorado at a place called the Little England Inn, which was small...but cute, clean and very affordable! The lady who ran the place was super, super nice and we got one of the best deals of the whole trip on our room! Unloading in the driving rain wasn't much fun...but anyone from Michigan isn't gonna be too phased by that...so no big deal!!!

 

Wow! Thanks for taking the time to share your trip with us. Looks like a blast! It was a pleasure meeting you in Paso.