On the Road Again

It's not too often that we have dinner with a guest from our Seven Porches Guest House. But the traveler who stayed with us this weekend happened to wander into the Whoop Em Up Hollow Cafe so we invited him to pull up a chair and join us for a glass of rose and a bite to eat.

I've always liked that about the Whoop and eater- ies like that. Patrons greet, chat and co-mingle inside or on the terrace: evening sun, company and good food - what's not to like?

When Scott Fisher made the booking on the Air BNB website for off-the-beaten- path travelers, I had a feeling we might write about him for The Times as I did with Jim Bragg. Remember him? He was the retired Wisconsin dairy farmer who stopped at the Seven Porches on his walk across the country two years ago.

This past weekend's guest, who lives in Las Vegas, may not be engaged in quite such a feat, but his cross-country journey Karen Matthee de- scribes in this week's edition of the paper is just as interesting from an automotive point of view.

That red 1960s Japanese convertible sports car he's weaving up and down and around the continent is tiny. Drafty, low to the ground and equipped with a trunk barely big enough for a brief case, the handsome little Datsun 1600 will give him a real down-to-earth ride on the highways and byways he's chosen to amble coast to coast.

As Karen interviewed him during dinner, we all began to reminisce about our long line of cars and how much things have changed since we first got our driver's license and crawled behind the wheel.

I remember my first one. It was a rusty old Morris Minor with highly unreliable brakes. I bought it for 40 "quid" (pounds) from an Irishman in County Cork while I was there working on a farm for the summer. I used house paint to cover up the rust and pulled the hand brake to bring it to a stop on the rolling country roads.

My second one was a VW bug, which I acquired with some savings for 800 Dutch guilders during my senior year in high school in the Netherlands. Then I drove it from Utrecht to the northernmost point on the Scottish mainland and back down to Gibraltar on the southern tip of Spain.

I remember skimping even on a cheap pension room, pulling over at night somewhere on the Iberian peninsula and trying to sleep in the back seat to find we'd eased right up to an expan- sive field of sunflowers that greeted us with the morning sun.

After I moved to North America, my first car was a powder-blue Volvo 122, which I bought for $500 and drove all over California with my girlfriend, camping on the beach in one of those quiet coves along Big Sur.

The best deal I ever got on a car was a 1970 Honda Civic, which my first wife and I bought for $100 from a young serviceman leaving the Big Island of Hawaii, where we had just arrived fully planning to hitchhike around its shores.

Sure it leaked oil and we had to clean the spark plugs every so often to keep it running. But it took us all the way around the island twice and up over the rug- ged saddle road right up the middle. When we arrived in Havi, a former sugar planta- tion town from where you can see Maui looming in the misty distance, we sold it for $140 to a local fisher- man who needed a car for his daughter and wanted a project. He even gave us a ride to the airport.

My wide-eyed romance with cars continued when I moved to Alaska. Just like in Hawaii, people were coming and going there, needing to unload or snap up wheels, so we bought low and sold high, spiffing and fixing the rigs in between. It helped pay my way through college.

Armed with a borrowed copy of "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot," I once even managed to do an engine overhaul and spray paint job on an old Beetle.

Scott's 1967 Datsun 1600 brought all those memories flooding back in an instant. With a healthy surge of nos- talgia, we realized that we'd never repeat any of these feats ever again even if we wanted to.

Keeping a modern car alive is a whole different matter. How long has it been since you opened the hood of a car and could actually see the ground or even touch all those parts you could easily get to in the earlier models?

What could be more inviting to a homegrown mechanic than the site of a simply mounted 1960s Volvo B20 four-cylinder engine whose water pump you could switch out in an hour? Thank God they still make sheetrock and two by fours.