Vehicle Inspection

Let's walk around the 1970 Toyota Land Cruiser, our rolling home for two months in the summer of 1973. 

It's light blue, with a white roof. My favorite feature is the big, black, hard rubber hooks that hold the hood closed. We popped them a few times to add oil — and to remove the air cleaner on a steep grade in the high Rockies when the air grew too thin for the aging engine. (I can't spot them in this photo, which isn't of our Toyota, at all.)

The tires were ridiculously exaggerated 'mudwings' — great for giant earth movers but just awful for days and days of highway driving. The whine they made was horrific, especially because the Toyota had no A/C, if memory serves, and we routinely rode with the windows down.

See the outline of the 'foot vent'  between the door and front fender? It was a lifesaver on hot days, scooping a cool breeze into the car when we kicked it open. It came in handy another way, too, in high school. When I occasionally locked my keys in the car in the Tates Creek parking lot, there was one female student with long enough, skinny enough arms to reach the keys in the ignition through that aperture. Don't remember her name, but God bless her! There was a foot vent on the passenger side, too, of course.

If you opened the front door you'd find a fire extinguisher tucked between the door frame and driver's seat. My dad gave it to me before we set off. We never needed it on the trip, but it was still there a couple of years later when the engine caught on fire. It worked!

Under the seat was a radio that never gave us anything but static, as I remember. No sound track for this journey, impossible as that is to believe today.

And the floor of the jeep: no insulation, just bare metal. On torrid summer days it sucked up the heat from the highway surface and grew nearly hot enough to melt our sneakers. And when we had to turn on the heater (the hoses for which ran down from the dash, across the floor and under the seat) in order to cool the engine, it could get mighty warm in the cabin.

Around back, if you swung out the spare and lifted the back, you'd see a piece of plywood on the two fold-down side seats with a couple of inches of foam rubber on top, covered in a sheet. Under the plywood slid our camp stove and other camping supplies.

The roof rack on top didn't fit too well -- it was made for an Electra 225 and borrowed from Lanny Schott. I wish I had footage of my steering around a curve in far western Kentucky and seeing Bill, shouting, reach out the window to catch the rack as it nearly slid off the roof. After that we braced it with nylon rope — off both front corners to the bumper and off the back and under the wheel wells. A nutty solution. And it worked.

I can only remember a couple of things the roof rack held: the tent, a heavy canvas affair, and its aluminum poles gathered together in a roomy golf club bag. Also a large cooler which held our grub and which we once filled with snow we gathered on a shaded hillside in early July near the north rim of the Grand Canyon. I guess our bags were up there, too. A little help on this detail?

What a ridiculous tin can to crisscross the country in. I loved it.