The first thing we did on entering Douglas was pack up some stuff we no longer needed. Roberto was folded up and packed away in his box along with his Spanish dictionary; we took out Bob and gave him a good shake to get rid of the cobwebs. Away went kilometres, centigrade, kilograms and out came the good old miles, farenheit, pounds and ounces. We were so looking forward to eating salads without wondering who had prepared them and what was the last thing they did with their hands beforehand. In fact, we looked forward just to being able to buy salads in supermarkets, and quality fruit and veggies. There’s only so much stodge a person can take and we had had our fill. We suspected that from now on we would have to be careful about how much we ate.It’s about five years since we were last in the USA; we were surprised by the difference in foodstuffs available in supermarkets. There was so much low fat, low sugar, low this that and the other that no-one has any excuse any more for not eating healthily. Our first shop for food left us reeling with shock. There was so much choice of quality foods, supermarkets are huge, well lit affairs with huge wide isles and pleasant staff. If you beamed up a little rural Bolivian woman and dumped her down in the middle of a Walmart she would die of shock. We felt like kids in a toy shop.
We had plenty of time that day to get to Tombstone, Arizona. You know – Wyatt and Virgil Earp, Doc Holiday, the Clanton gang, the shootout at the OK coral, Boot Hill cemetery. To get there we drove through real cowboy country - desert, heat, seguaro cactus that look like the Devils Pitchfork. Tombstone needs a UN peace corps, the town is still having shootouts several times a day. The stagecoaches still run, saloons are still full of loose women, handlebar moustaches are still in vogue and firearms are forbidden in public places. Our mission was to get to Mesa to visit Douglas and Carol Pelton. There was a certain symmetry to crossing into Douglas and visiting someone called Douglas. We didn’t know Doug or Carol from a bar of soap. They are TC owners and know a mutual friend in MG circles – Bill Hentzen. We were keeping Bill up to date on our movements, Bill knew Doug and Carol lived close to Douglas, let them know of our whereabouts and to cut a long story short, Doug and Carol offered us a bed and a garage to work on the car. This is what owning an MG is all about, we belong to a worldwide family that is ready and willing to offer help to anyone in the family. It doesn’t matter if you know them personally or not because after 5 minutes, you have known them all your life.
On the way between Mesa and Tombstone we visited Colossal Caves, a warren of limestone caves with stalagmites and stalagtites, a system convoluted enough to allow bank robbers to hide their loot in the day of sheriffs and deputies and “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters. We also visited a national park full of seguaro cactus. One elderly lady behind the counter in the gift shop commented on our choice of postcard – a couple of young ground squirrels, cute as buttons.
“I suppose you think they’re cute, don’t you?”
“Well, actually, yes.”
“Hmmm, thought so. Well, I got land. Every night the darn critters did a million holes and every morning I get up and fill in a million holes. They sure ain’t cute.”
She slammed the cashtill closed with venom.
It didn’t take long to learn that the USA is still pretty wild out west. They can put a man on the moon but they can’t outsmart Mother Nature. Take insects for starters. There are tarantulas in the desert, big as the palm of your hand. If you see one it’s no good screaming, or trying to stamp on them, you end up riding an eight legged skateboard. Scorpions are another issue. I always thought they were black and big, but they are actually bleached pale cream in colour. The big guys look the worst but it’s the little guys you have to watch for. The sting can’t kill you, it’s just extremely painful.
Moving on up the scary ladder there are the rattlers and their bite is serious. They all have one thing in common – they don’t sit there in the full blazing sun so you can avoid stepping on them, they hide under rocks or in dry fallen leaves in the shade to keep cool. Impromptu comfort stops out in the open are a whole new ballgame requiring an eagle eye and nerves of steel. Blokes at least have the benefit of elevation.Mesa is hotter than a peppered sprout. 110F in the shade in late June; 120F in the middle of summer. All of Arizona is like this, Nevada is possibly hotter, so is Utah, and much of California is also desert. We had also hit a heat wave. How can you have a heat wave when it’s normally 110F and instead it reaches 117F? We found Doug and Carol’s place mid-afternoon. Any later and we would have been puddles of liquid. Within 5 minutes, we were buddies.
Doug and Carol are great entertainers, so what do they do when we turn up? Yep, invite the Arizona MG Roadrunners club to meet us and enjoy an evening of wine and food. We gave a sort of photo show rigged up on their TV so that people could get a flavour of the countries we had travelled through. Doug and Bob spent 3 days under and in the TC. The passenger side (my side so my fault of course!) wheel bearing was shattered, but we had spares, several nuts were loose or not there and a few bolts had gone walkabout. Doug had also prepared a new radiator grill for us – the current one looked like it had been in a war.
Doug has spent the last 4 years restoring a TC to concours condition. I know of very few MGs that have been restored to this standard. The TC gets its first airing at an MG event in Monterey, California in early July. Doug gave up precious time to help Bob with our TC and get it back to roadworthy condition. We can’t thank him enough.
What we didn’t realise at the time when we first arrived at their house was that we needed time out to come back down to normality, whatever that was. We slept a lot, and each of us had a rough day, luckily on different days. Maybe we’d been more stressed out than we realised, but those days we spent with Doug and Carol were precious ones. Serendipity played an ace card. Bob mentioned to Doug that I had always wanted an MGA. “Funny you should say that, there’s one for sale by a club member here in Phoenix”.
I am now the proud owner of a 1957 MGA MkI, white with red interior, in amazing condition from having been in the desert since 1966 and little used. It will be shipped out of the USA soon bound for New Zealand. It’s a birthday present for when I reach pensionable age so Bob is going to have to get his skates on restoring it. The MGA is an easy restoration. How many people have said that before?
They took us out to a casino/stage show in Phoenix and talk about lucky – we got to see Elvis and the Temptations as well as other really famous performers. Elvis got the whole audience rocking. He is doing really well for his age, but didn’t I hear somewhere that he had retired or something? And he’s lost a lot of weight, which is a good thing. The Temptations took us back to our courting days when we were into Motown music; they brought the house down.We had signed up for the Western MG GOF in Monterey while we were in Mexico. GOF stands for Gathering of the Faithful. The Western states MG car clubs organise this event annually. One of the organisers had invited us to visit them in San Diego, so our next port of call was southern California. Mesa to San Diego is a fairly straight forward westerly trip, but we don’t do straight lines. Doug and Carol had sorted out a hit list of places to visit so first we headed off north.
We never made our target destination for the day; the landscapes are too dramatic to rush through. Most roads in the USA are wide, easy, well sign posted – real armchair motoring. We discovered route 89A, a great road to drive in any classic car. You could buy a teeshirt that said “I’ve driven the 89A curves”. Curves is a good description, for they certainly aren’t hairpins or switchbacks, just gently arching curves that you can easily get an RV around.
Instead of staying in a motel as planned to avoid the heat at night, we ended up camping at altitude, which was not only tolerable but very pleasant. It was a forestry site with no showers, just a long drop toilet and a cold tap. There were bear warning posters around with advice to hang food from a tree and not close to tents or RVs. Bob quizzed the warden. He reassured us that there had only been one full on bear attack in the last 17 years. Another camper said they were only black bears. Bob said he didn’t care what colour they were. Late May, early June was the worst time for bear attacks when juveniles leave their mothers. It was the first week of June.
We lost height as we headed south for the Mojave desert and on to Yuma, so very, very close to the Mexican border, and then west to San Diego. There isn’t a scrap of shade in the Mojave and it’s hot, hot, hot. From Yuma we took the westerly road up into the Sierras and down to coastal California. There was no relief from the heat until we docked at Mike and Jo Campbell’s place just outside San Diego. Again, people we didn’t know before we booked onto the upcoming GOF in Monterey. Basically we had the run of the house and garage, I caught up with a load of paperwork, Bob did a thorough clean of the car, we were both swept up into their family celebrations like aunt and uncle – a grandson’s graduation party from 6th grade, a daughter’s wedding anniversary…..
We had a date with destiny in Las Vegas with Elton John at Caesar’s Palace. We had always thought Las Vegas to be the height of tack until we went several years ago and surprise, surprise, we loved it. It is so over the top but you can’t help get swept up in the glitz. The TC hadn’t been so we had to go again. San Diego to Las Vegas involves driving through desert again, up some very long drags. By mid-afternoon we had an intermittent back fire, infrequent at first but more regular the further we went. Was it petrol, or fuel starvation? We tried the driving with bonnet half folded back routine that had always worked before on long steep climbs in hot conditions in the European Alps, but no, there was no improvement.Elton John is an outrageously talented musician, a born entertainer who obviously loves his job. We had a terrific time. His Red Piano tour had another couple of days to run so we were lucky to get seats. Caesars Palace is one of the biggest casinos, completely over the top in decoration and architecture, but the sound of the slot machines is amazing and relentless – like a hundred orchestras all tuning up at once. The cocktail waitresses are still as ready for retirement as they were five years ago.
We thought at first that there was a chublet convention in town. “Chublet” is a term a friend of ours in Charlotte, North Carolina penned to describe the super-sized people that America excels at. Chublets tend to congregate where little energy is expended, such as Las Vegas. You don’t see them near walking trails in national parks. It’s a crying shame to see people as big as this; it’s obvious how they got into that state but what chance do they stand to return to normal? Judging by the amount of food they were shovelling down, not a lot.
We had a spare day in Las Vegas, which Bob spent sorting out the backfire. He checked the carb balance, but all this did was give us a misfire as well as a backfire. Bob has a theory now that we must stick to: if we have a problem, just think, what was the last thing I did to the car? In this instance, he cleaned the carb bowls when were in San Diego. In doing so, he disturbed the plug leads, which we knew were already fragile. We also had an intermittent problem starting the car. A battery store checkup revealed a burnt out battery (they don’t last longer than 4 years in the desert with the heat), and a new set of race car plug leads cured the backfire and misfire. So, we had a car that started first pull and didn’t cough and splutter, again.
The TC hadn’t been to the Grand Canyon either, but we had, so we turned the steering wheel in the direction of Flagstaff and headed off into the big hot and dry. Soon after crossing the Hoover Dam, in the middle of nowhere, without a trace of shade, the engine suddenly started revving but we had no drive to the wheels. At first Bob thought that the clutch had gone, but as we drifted to a halt, and after thinking logically, it was obvious that we had broken a half shaft. We run on tapered half shafts, this set had last over 78,000 miles. We always carry a spare set complete with hubs. Normally when we break half shafts it’s when setting off from a standing start, which is why we were so puzzled. This one broke where all our others have broken, at the hub end, whereas most people we talk to have theirs break at the diff end.
We also carry a huge MG umbrella, not for the rain but for the sun. It took an hour to swop the half shaft, in 115F of heat, with me holding the umbrella over Bob to stop him from frying, and to keep tools cool. If you leave them out in the sun for even a minute, they are too hot to touch. Cars and trucks passed by and never gave us a second glance. A man in a sedan stopped, but only to take a photograph. Later, a woman saw us and turned around to offer us the use of her mobile phone and water if we needed it. She told us that no-one stops on this road to help anyone. Just as we were packing up, a policeman stopped and stayed with us until he knew that we were mobile. He is a biker, Harleys are his passion, so we had plenty to talk about.
It doesn’t matter how many times you see the Grand Canyon, you get to the rim and gasp. It is too big to photograph and capture the essence of the whole, and it is too big to hold it in the memory. It is truly astonishing, a natural wonder of the world. It made Copper Canyon in Mexico seem puny. It made anything seem puny. The first time we came here we walked the Bright Angel Trail down into the canyon; we got further than Indian Gardens but not to the very bottom. We did the walk in late April in perfect walking weather. We would not want to do it at this time of year – late June – but people were walking the trail.While we were camped in Flagstaff, we took a day trip south towards Sedona on part of the 89A that we hadn’t driven on the way to San Diego. What a road, what landscapes. It’s a wonderful classic car and bikers route. While in Sedona, I stumbled upon a gifty sort of shop that sold jewelry that I liked. The lady owner was half French and half Egyptian. We got on like a house on fire. She was so chic and I looked totally scruffy but we liked the same jewelry, all made by a friend of hers, a Frenchman of course. I made a comment about her blouse, she felt we had an uncommon rapport and at once asked me to make a decision for her that she had been struggling with for some time. By this time a shop assistant was shaking her head and making the cut-it gesture across her throat.
It transpired that the lady owner had a problem. Her husband was buying her a Mercedes SLK sports car. Some problem. She couldn’t decide between red with black trim, or white with black trim and red seats. I told her that cars above a certain size look ridiculous in red and the SLK was knocking on that particular door. That was it. She was straight on her mobile to the Mercedes garage, barked “white” into it and proceeded to dance around the shop to Egyptian pop music, and getting all the other clientele to join in the decision-making celebration. Meanwhile I paid my bill. The assistant muttered under her breath “get out while you can”, so I did. Meanwhile Bob had spent a relaxing half hour talking to some old guy about cars, so we were both happy with Sedona.
