An authentic adventure
TRAVELING TIGERS
On Jan. 19, the Traveling Tigers will welcome Diane Wood and Gerald Gaughen, a couple who re-created Wood’s family’s adventure from Michigan to California along Route 66. Everyone is invited to bring their own lunches to Clubhouse 3, Room 9. The room will be called to order by club President Ed Hickman at noon, and the presentation will begin at 1 p.m. All attendees must wear masks, except while eating. To guarantee a seat, members and guests should RSVP to Susan Shaver at (562) 795-9151.
Wood shared the following as a preview of the program: When Mom and Grandpa were leaving on their trip from Grandville, Michigan, to Rialto, California, to visit Grandpa’s brother, the first entry in my mother’s journal read: ‘10-28-34-Sunday Mileage 49901. Left home 9:50 A.M.’ Their trip would be 2,825 miles, mostly on Route 66, included 11 states and lasted 16 days.
When I suggested a few years ago to my husband, Gerald, that we should follow in their tire tracks for the ultimate nostalgia trip, his now-famous response was, ‘But it’s not authentic unless we do it in a Model A!’ So we bought a Model A to do just that and set off on Oct. 21, 2017. We named her Betsy after my late sister-in-law, who would have loved our trip.
We shipped Betsy to Grand Rapids and flew there to pick her up—then found out she wouldn’t start. Fortunately, we got in touch with a local Ford Model A expert and, with the help of a AAA tow, got to his place, where he fixed up Betsy better than new—and he didn’t charge us anything.
After that, our trip was fairly uneventful, except for the rainstorm we drove through all the way to Chicago with a leaking windshield and a wiper that didn’t work. But the best part was that Betsy was the star; we were merely her escorts. She attracted attention wherever she went.
The two experiences Mom and Grandpa had that we could not duplicate, however, were crossing the Colorado River and viewing the construction of Boulder (now Hoover) Dam. They left Route 66 at Kingman and headed north to cross the Colorado River.
But how do you cross the Colorado River to see the dam when there is no bridge across the river? Simple: You take the aerial ferry. Eight cables and a Model T engine on top will carry you putt-putting across the river. Just drive aboard the platform, and off you go.
They arrived safely at Boulder Dam, and as part of their tour, Mom told me many years later that she and Grandpa stood on the bottom of what is now Lake Mead. That must have been a real high—or low—point of their trip. From there, it was mostly downhill to Rialto, their final destination.
They—and we—truly had an ordinary adventure.
Wood and Gaughen also detailed their journey in the book “An Ordinary Adventure: Retracing Mom and Grandpa’s 1934 Trip on Route 66—in a Model A,” published in 2018 and available via Amazon.
