Studebaker – Page 2 – Chasing Phantoms

Editor’s note: Given limited travel opportunities these days, I decided each Thursday to post travel stories I’d written prior to starting this blog. The following is from a cross-country trip I made along the length of US 50 in the spring of 2018. I hope you might vicariously enjoy this trip while we’re all hunkering down at home. Because this is a longer trip (a week and a half), I’m going to post each of the daily entries over each of the next 10 days.

So, I took yesterday off from driving 50, and instead spent the day visiting my friend Chris and his wonderful wife Carol at their lakefront home in Moneta, which is 40 minutes outside of Roanoke (pop: 9,891) in southern Virginia. Even if you haven’t been to Moneta, you’ve seen it in the classic Bill Murray film, What About Bob? Chris shares a number of my interests, including trains, Edward Allen Poe, and Sherlock Holmes. Accordingly, we spent yesterday at the O. Winston Link museum and the Virginia Museum of Transportation. We ate a late lunch at Roanoke’s oldest (and perhaps smallest) restaurant, and then went back home to fail miserably at a game based around a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

I always feel obliged to take Studebaker photos. This 1870 Studebaker Half-Platform Wagon is at the Virginia Museum of Transportation.

Today I left Moneta around noon, and, at Chris’ suggestion, I stopped at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (pop: 47,000) to see Edgar Allan Poe’s dorm room. It turns out that Poe had studied at UVA in 1826.

Poe’s dorm room is preserved with period furniture and references to his then-budding literary career.

Is that a pallid bust of Pallas on the windowsill?

It should be noted that the room is part of a still-operating dorm building. Poe’s room (#13, fittingly) is glassed off, but the all the other rooms are occupied by UVA students. To that point, the space in front of Poe’s current next door neighbor was littered with beer empties. I am not making this up. You’d wish that the current residents of Poe’s dorm building would show more respect for Poe’s memory. And yet, if you think about how Poe met his demise, perhaps the beer empties are fitting.

I suspect the university police told the revelers, “Nevermore.”

About 6 pm I finally make it back to Winchester, VA, whence I’d taken my detour away from US 50 on Wednesday evening. Rather than resume my driving trip immediately, I decided to just get some dinner and find a hotel for the night, and start out fresh in the morning. Now, I’ve had surprisingly good luck with my hotel accommodations all along this trip. I’ve been stopping mainly in small towns, and the innkeepers have seemed genuinely happy to see me. Today, however, I’m in a somewhat larger town, the motel is rather crowded, and to the innkeeper I’m just another traveler who’s washed up onto his doorstep. Out in the parking lot, next to my room, some other guests are drinking beer and rebuilding the engine of their Cutlass. Next to them, a group of young people has a Weber barbecue set up in the parking lot, with flames at an alarming height. It actually seems rather festive. But I wonder if any of these people is actually staying at the motel.

Since I don’t have any US 50 stories from today, allow me to share a few earlier photos that didn’t make it into previous blogs:

Ominous memorial on the shoulder of US 50 in Nevada

Windmill valiantly struggling to pump water in the Nevada desert

The Apostrophiser strikes again! (Delta, UT)

OK, now you’re caught up on my photo collection from US 50 so far. Tomorrow I should get through Washington, DC and into MD. Until then!

Sdb

P.S.” The Yaris has now logged close to 3,000 miles on this trip (with detours). There are two ways of measuring this. One is the odometer, and the other is the accretion of bugs on the sideview mirror:

Thank God Hertz didn’t ask for a cleaning deposit

Here’s a picture of the first grain elevator I saw this morning, heading east out of Larkin, KS:

And here’s a picture of the second grain elevator I saw:

Now, multiply those pictures by 100, and you get a sense of the scenery along US 50 through Kansas. Seriously. It’s flat, with lots of open space and no trees, and periodic, looming grain elevators. I suppose there’s some kind of charm to the monotony. But monotonous it was.

Breakfast was at Richie’s Café in Cimmaron. I was craving a good cup of strong, fresh-brewed, artisan coffee, a toasted bagel and cream cheese, and some good juice. The outside of the place didn’t look promising, but it was the only game in town. I entered the double doors, and found myself in a small, dark anteroom with another set of double doors. These I opened, and stepped into a large, windowless auditorium with ancient wood flooring. It looked like the place where the Peanuts put on their Christmas pageant in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” In the middle of the room were rows of long tables surrounded by folding chairs. A group of about eight people, all of retirement age and none with a healthy body mass index, where chatting over coffee and a couple of empty plates. They evidently had been there awhile. The waitress (if that’s the correct term) brought me a menu, which I searched in vain for my artisan coffee and bagel and juice. I had to settle for a greasy breakfast taco. I was back in the Yaris and on the road within 10 minutes.

I suppose it’s fair to say that there wasn’t a lot notable about Kansas. I was looking forward to Dodge City (pop: 27,000), which is on my route, but just about all traces of the old west there are contained in museums or reconstructed facsimiles. It felt too touristy for this trip. I did stop at a grocery store in the town of Meridian (pop: 813). You haven’t truly heard laughter until you’ve asked a Kansan if they have Naked Juice.

Oh, I also made a stop to check out an old 19^th century stone arch bridge in the town of Clements (pop: 0). The bridge crosses the Cottonwood River in an idyllic setting. I think I may have walked through poison ivy to take the photo, so I hope you appreciate it!

So, that’s about it for Kansas. After I got to Emporia, US 50 again merged with an Interstate (I-35), which sped me toward Kansas City. Soon I was in Missouri. Once I left behind the congestion of KC, the drive became quite pleasant. Missouri is a greener, hillier state than Kansas.

I stopped in Jefferson City at the state Capitol, which was unfortunately being renovated. It appears to be much larger than California’s Capitol. It strikes me that US 50 goes through four state capitals as well as the country’s capital. That seems to be a testament to how important the road was when it was originally designated.

I was enjoying the drive when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Studebaker truck parked in a driveway. I stopped on the side of the road, and asked the two old guys sitting on the front porch of a tidy brick home whether they owned the truck. One of them (whose name turned out to be Roy) claimed ownership, and came down from his porch to show it off, opening the hood to reveal the small-block Chevy engine he had dropped into it. He had bought the truck about three years ago, and as he used to teach body work at the local technical school, he had no problem fixing up the truck. Roy retired 11 years ago, and when he isn’t working on his Studebaker, he’s sitting on his front porch with his friend Dean “counting cars as they pass.”

Studebaker owners’ motto: We’d rather fix than switch. (Youngsters can learn the reference here.)

Dean lives across the street, and after I had praised Roy’s Studebaker, Dean insisted that we go over to his place to check out his 1950 Chevy convertible. We walked over, and Dean pulled the car out of the enormous, warehouse-like garage so that I could see it in the sunlight. It was a beauty. He then invited me into the garage to see his other cars (3 or 4 of them, including a Mustang convertible).

After thanking Roy and Dean for the tour, I got back in the Yaris with a bit of embarrassment, and made the final leg of today’s trip, to Union, MO (just west of St. Louis).

Tag: Studebaker

Days 8 and 9: Old Dominion

Day 5: Kansas and Missouri