An ode to the worst adventure car ever and all the places it’s taken me

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Sometimes I think about my old car when I drive past Walmart. Parking there was essentially the starting point for my first real long-distance road trip as an adult, spanning ten days and eight states in the late spring of 2004. We drove my 1996 Pontiac Grand Am GT, a car that my friend Nick declared he would “never buy a two-door car.”

I didn’t keep a diary of the trip, but I think Nick said this while standing at the Watchman campground in Zion National Park, perhaps on the eighth day of our argument about things in the back seats of the car. We couldn’t use the trunk because it was full of everything I could take with me from my graduate school apartment in Missoula, Montana, to our final stop in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I was moving with my then-girlfriend. We tried to keep what we needed in the back seat, and of course, to access anything in the back seat, you had to fold the front seat down, lean over, and lean around the corner.

I believe this type of two-door design was, and perhaps still is, called a “coupe,” a word that is almost never combined with the word “adventure,” and that’s what we were trying to use the Grand Am for. and certainly not the word “garbage bag”, which is the type of adventure we were trying to create.

We left Missoula about 10 days before Memorial Day. Nick arrived on a Greyhound bus from somewhere in Iowa, an 18-hour trip he’ll probably never make again. So a car, any car, a space that he would only have to share with one person probably seemed like an improvement.

I got the car through my college roommate Chris, whose brother Andy bought it at auction, fixed the only problem (someone tried to steal the passenger side airbag), and then sold it to me. There were a few reasons why it wasn’t an ideal touring car, some of which were my fault.

By the time Nick added his stuff, I had already packed the trunk almost completely, and then attached a Yakima bike rack to the trunk to transport the old Schwinn mountain bike to Arizona, so if either of us needed anything in the trunk , we had to remove the bike, remove the bike rack, and then open the trunk. The bike and rack, of course, fell off the back of the car a few times on rough mountain roads, first on the way up and down to the Mount Pilchuck trailhead outside of Seattle. When we came to the end of our short, steep climb, the summit was in the clouds.

People sleep in all kinds of adventure vehicles – old vans, new Sprinter vans, SUVs, topper trucks, camper trucks, station wagons, and even sedans that have folding rear seats. The Grand Am’s seats did not fold down. And we couldn’t recline the front seats very far because all our stuff was in the back seat. However, we slept in the car twice because we were young and hardy and had no other options: once by the ocean somewhere near Aberdeen, Washington, and once near Barstow, California, where we went after climbing Half Dome. and the inability to find a campsite anywhere near the park.

We slept in tents almost every other night, except for a couple of nights we spent on friends’ floors in Seattle and Bend. The trunk light somehow melted a hole in Nick’s Therm-a-Rest on the second to last day of the trip, so he slept rather uncomfortably on our last night in Mexican Hat, Utah. Late in the afternoon we stopped by the ranger station at Natural Bridges National Monument and asked about camping, and during the course of the “I swear this actually happened” conversation that I’ve written about elsewhere is as stupid as it sounds , as if I would pick it up—the ranger said, “You guys don’t want to set up camp here. In an hour you’ll be done with this park. I’ll tell you what: are you stressed?

I looked at Nick, shrugged and nodded. We were young, fit and probably looked pretty energetic I think. The ranger advised us to head south into the Valley of the Gods, all of which was owned by the BLM and we could just drive off the road and camp anywhere we found a spot. We thanked him for his advice and left, and I was opening the car door in the parking lot when I realized what he actually said. Over the roof of the car I said to Nick:

“Oh, he meant ‘in tents,’ like we camp in tents or we have a van.”

“Yes,” Nick said, not understanding my confusion.

The Grand Am’s low ground clearance meant we didn’t get very far into the Valley of the Gods before we chickened out and drove back onto the paved highway and spent the night at a paid campground behind the Mexican Hat cabin. It wasn’t that intense. The next day we drove through Monument Valley, explored the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and gave the car a well-deserved rest in the visitors’ parking lot at my girlfriend’s apartment complex in Scottsdale after the greatest adventure ever. .

To be honest, I didn’t buy the car under the pretense that it was a “touring car” or an “adventure car.” I bought it because it was a pretty good deal from a trusted friend, and I wasn’t very picky about cars. And I didn’t treat it very well – I bought it in 1999 if I remember correctly, and I’ve been sober since March 2002, but the period of time in between was a little rough on the car. The driver’s window not working was my fault (rolled it down when it was icy) as was everything that went wrong with the front right wheel (hit a curb at high speed). The windshield was once broken (a friend tried to jump over the car as we were leaving a party; I eventually fixed it) and the trunk-mounted CD player was smashed by a full beer keg that rolled into it (on our return to our party ).

Still, it was what I had, and having entered the job market in 2004 with a degree in journalism, I wasn’t prepared for the down payment on a new BMW. Or any car at all. I worked in the Phoenix area for a year and then moved to Denver, where the Grand Am was even less useful because, you know, it snowed.

Luckily, Nick, who lived in Denver, had bought a 2004 Toyota Tacoma and was ready to hit the Summit County ski resorts in the winter and the mountain trails all summer. However, one winter day I went to Rocky Mountain National Park to go snowshoeing and met a guy my age who was also from the Midwest. We chatted all the way to the parking lot, and when I pulled up behind the Grand Am, he asked, “Is that your car?”

I said, “Yes. It’s kind of a Midwestern car.”

He said, “It’s like a meth machine.”

I was not going to defend the honor of Grand Am. I mean, its overall aesthetic doesn’t exactly scream “NOT a meth car,” but it also never lets me down, at least not much. And while we never drove my car to a trailhead unless there was some shady dirt road there, I remembered that day last summer when we set off in Nick’s Tacoma to climb Grace and Torrey Peaks. The road to the trailhead was rough, with potholes, potholes, and large exposed rocks, and I was glad Nick volunteered to drive his truck.

But then, about a half mile from the trailhead, the Jeep in front of us slowed down and someone in a Honda Civic was in front of it, negotiating a very difficult spot on the road for a sedan, backing up. reorienting himself, moving forward, retreating back again, and then dispatching him without a scratch. The Civic made it to the trailhead just fine. I lived in Colorado on and off for 15 years and learned that whenever you think a Forest Service road is impassable for people without high ground clearance and four-wheel drive, you will always see someone making it to the parking lot. area in a damn Honda Civic.

The Grand Am survived our 10-day road trip through eight states, saw its share of national parks and quite a few Forest Service roads, but it was never my first choice if anyone else wanted to take their vehicle to a full day of hiking or skiing. One evening in February 2006, I was driving down Josephine Street in Denver with my then-girlfriend, and a guy slammed into him from a stop sign on 5th Avenue, not noticing us until his car was bulldozed into the front passenger seat of a Grand Am on full speed. We hit a lamppost on a street corner, hard enough to bend it, but not hard enough to topple it over. Right after we stopped, I looked at my girlfriend and asked, “Are you okay?” She said yes, she thought she was fine. A few seconds later, I quietly but excitedly said, “I think the car is broken.” Destroying the machine, of course, was the only way to replace it with my $25,000 a year salary at the newspaper. Once the insurance money came in, I found a 1996 Subaru Impreza Outback AWD on Craigslist. I thought he could take me anywhere, and he did.

The Grand Am was a poor fit for the lifestyle I wanted at the time—I really wanted to see the world, and the world I wanted to see didn’t have smooth roads leading to it. It was a mechanism that didn’t work very well. But when I first started, everything I had wasn’t very good: cotton pants, clunky hiking boots, ill-fitting backpacks, a heavy sleeping bag, the cheapest climbing shoes I could find, a thrift store snowboard. trousers.

Wouldn’t it be nice to use some better gear? Certainly. But I’m glad I didn’t let that stop me from getting out there.