When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
I bought my first Vette back in 1979 it was a 1975 L82 coupe 4mt, i can remember the feeling i had driving that car back in the day it was like i was the king of the world. Never forget my first love. How about you.
Florida to San Jose in a 1964 Corvette. My buddy spent every spare penny he had buying it and didn’t have time for a tune-up or the sense to install new tires before he headed out from Orlando. I planned to fly into Atlanta the next night and join up. I managed to get bumped off two overbooked Delta flights in a row and ended up flying for free AND garnering two future, free flights. But this was before cellphones. I tried and tried to leave a message for Dave through the airlines that I'd be arriving later. Would he get it? Would he still be there when I arrived? He was. His car was unmistakable roaring up to the terminal in the middle of the night. We chowed down at Waffle House at 3 a.m. and took off into the misty dawn. It was to be all Blue Highways, back roads, no Interstates or chain restaurants. A copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was to be our Bible.
There at the corner of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia were more fireworks stands than we had ever seen, so of course we stocked up on M-80's and smoke bombs which we threw out of the car at suitable opportunities the rest of the trip. Of course, given the side pipes, most folks probably thought the noise and smoke had come from the car backfiring.
We were a pair of hot-shot applications engineers at a Silicon Valley start-up called Daisy with the first hint of success and money in our pockets. Buying a classic Corvette just seemed the right thing to do. We’d made a few bucks investing in our firm’s stock. It was going to the moon and everyone knew it. Our "smart" CAD software automated the design of computer chips. Previously every piece of silicon was drawn, rectangle by rectangle, by hand. Unlike old-style CAD, our radical new software understood "connectivity. Drag the rectangles that made up a transistor and the wires attaching it to others "rubber banded." It was a design innovation that allowed productivity to go completely nuts and companies like Intel to put out things like Pentium processors with tens of millions of transistors. It eliminated the thousands of layout errors that would otherwise occur. Well, most of 'em.
The damn Vette kept breaking down, first we needed a new clutch in Nashville, then a U-joint near Clarksville Kentucky. We stayed in my old college dorm in Nashville while the downtown Chevy place put in a new one, hitting music row and some of my old haunts. After seeing a movie in Clarksville we told some ladies impressed by the Corvette we were “Location Agents” for a film that was going to be shot there. That plus a little alcohol.... Seems they all knew a lake where we could film the sun rising — in the East. It had to rise over the lake “from the East.” We were VERY insistent about the sun rising in the east! They were willing to take us out and show us the lake at 2.am more than slightly inebriated. Remember, this was pre-AIDS. Good times.
What surprised us the most were all the full size satellite TV dishes springing up next to farmhouses across America. From nothing to 250+ channels with nothing but a check and a bootleg converter. Rural America had gotten wired. Well, dished. Imagine seeing Ted Turner’s 24 hour news when you were accustomed to none, for ...your entire life. The impact 24 hour news would ultimately have on middle America we couldn't have possibly forseen.
Diners and cafes were where we stopped, never McDonalds or Denny’s. You got a flavor of the town from the old men sucking coffee and the "faded glory" waitresses who should have left town a long time ago. They welcomed us and came out to chat about the car when we went to leave. The young waitress at the tiny cafe in a one-horse town in Kansas assured us “Charlie,” the Frito Lay guy, came by EVERY SINGLE DAY to refill the rack. The Internet had yet to be invented and business was still done the old fashioned way.
We followed a shiny stainless Kraft tanker truck across the loneliest highway in America, getting right on his bumper and drafting for slightly better fuel mileage. We drafted him until he locked up the brakes and turned down a deserted dirt road. Trust me. There were no cows, and no dairies down that road. We joked THAT was Area 51, back when it officially did not exist, or something else, because no “milk truck” had any business going down that dirt road. Fortunately we just missed creaming his rear bumper. The smell of his trailer tires locking up is what awakened us from our stupor, into which we were lulled by the endless roar of the 327 motor and side pipes.
I'd tell you about listening to radio preachers and country music -- " 730 on the AM dial!" all the way across the country except the side pipes on the Corvette made the radio completely useless. Tinny top 40 music was the one part of the road trip experience we missed out on.
At one point we were getting somewhere south of 7 mpg, the motor running rough and belching black smoke. A “19 year Corvette mechanic” in the middle of nowhere, Nevada, told us “No problem, one bowl on your Holley double pumper has sagged, I’ll double gasket it" He came up with a second gasket out of a box of old carburetor parts he had sitting on the shelf, in a tiny town with no Corvettes, no muscle cars left. He probably hadn’t seen a Holley or Rochester carburetor in years. It seemed at every breakdown we ran into JUST the right guy to fix the ‘64 for us, although the cast pot-metal, half-moon glove box door, which weighed at least five pounds, continued slamming into my knees all the way into San Jose. At one point I threatened to rip it off its hinges.
We were at least back into double-digit gas mileage.
Everywhere we went there was someone wanting to ask us about the Corvette or they wanted to tell us their Corvette story. Either they’d owned one, their high school friend had owned one, a relative, or else someone they knew had died in one. We listened to endless Vette stories. (As I do again today, it’s the price of admission).
A fourth and final flat occurred near Lake Tahoe, We were running for home at that point, late on our schedule. We had replaced the tires one by one, and now had a completely non-matching set made up of whatever some garage in some tiny town had lying around. They weren’t even all the same size. Headed alongside the Truckee river I heard this hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet of a leaking tire going around. By this point I was SERIOUSLY PISSED OFF Dave hadn't invested in new tires before starting this journey. Including a spare!
You can never budget enough time for a good road trip; it expands to fill the available days and weeks. You can never take too many pictures. And you can never stop as many times as you should have, for Historical Markers, funny signs, old churches, and other things to see and do en route. The ideal road trip would never end. Alas, at some point, ours had to. We were already running behind “schedule.”
We had camped a little, to the delight of hundreds of mosquitoes, but mostly stayed in cheap motels which averaged $19 a night back then. The rough ride of the Vette made a hot shower and a soft bed seem well worth $10. We avoided big towns as best we could. We looked for the smallest, curviest roads from A to B those times we were forced to consult a map. Mostly it was.... head west!
A fly fishing trip on the South Fork of the North Something river outside Denver had been the highlight of the trip, along with an impromptu TV repair at our host’s cabin. A cold solder joint was repaired with a nail, held in Vice-Grips, heated red hot over a stove burner. Made the football field on the old color TV green again. My buddy Dave, the driver and TV repair wizard who had NEVER fly fished, said “One must merely think like a fish” and pulled a trout in on his first cast. Son-of-a-bitch! Me, an experienced bait fisherman, I got skunked! All in all it was very Zen like. I had the EE degree, but Dave knew how to actually fix a TV, which, in my father’s estimation, was a far superior skill. (Nowadays a TV consists of one or two computer chips driving a big screen. Not gonna repair it with a hot nail)
We only drove one 20 mile stretch of superslab, somewhere in Utah, only ate in 3 or 4 fast food restaurants out of necessity. We had completed our mission. Coast to Coast on blue highways, 2 lanes, small towns, cafes and diners the whole way.
We learned to take the road less traveled, that there is no such place as “Lost” when you’re searching for adventure, and to take all the time we could with everyone who had a story to tell us. When you come to a fork in the road, once choice always becomes obvious. We learned to trust the Universe, as every single time we broke down, a repair expert of one sort or another appeared to help us along our way, no matter where we were on our journey or the amount of expertise needed. Like one able to pull down a dusty box full of carburetor parts and send us on our way in less time than it took to eat lunch at the diner next door.
Gratitude? Yeah. America was full of people out to share our adventure, help us along the way, encourage us, and welcome us into their little town. "I sure wish I could do what you two are doing!" we heard over and over.
i had a co-worker ( around 1988 ) who gave me a ride in his '69 drop-top, 427, 4spd, side pipes.
It was a bit rough with a loose front suspension, bad brakes, but when he romped on it, nothing sounds better!
this one is still on my list of future ownership.
.
Very little experience on my side... I grew up in the 80s & 90s, so around the time I was hip to cars the C6 came out, then the next year the C6 widebody. I remember lusting over it, the sex machine it was. In spring 2018 I bought my first vette, a 2013 3LT Manual GS coupe and its been my favorite vehicle I've ever owned.
I do love the C2, C3 body style, but for the modern performance stuff I'm looking for owning one isn't practical. The C5Zs are fantastic looking too, but I'm just a hair too tall.
Come to think of it... growing up playing racing sims may have had an impact on what I consider "cool"... The C6.R and C7.R with those wings....
that's what I love most about the older rides. rough riding, semi-poor handling, poor mpg.
but at the same time, that's also what's appealing about them. raw & pure!
YOU have to drive them. no nannies, the feel and smell. take your pick of all, or any of these.
new(er) cars have their place too, but when it's just you and the car, nothing better then a smooth launch, followed by clean 2 - 3 shift!
almost makes me want to start looking for a C3!
soon.
Florida to San Jose in a 1964 Corvette. My buddy spent every spare penny he had buying it and didn’t have time for a tune-up or the sense to install new tires before he headed out from Orlando. I planned to fly into Atlanta the next night and join up. I managed to get bumped off two overbooked Delta flights in a row and ended up flying for free AND garnering two future, free flights. But this was before cellphones. I tried and tried to leave a message for Dave through the airlines that I'd be arriving later. Would he get it? Would he still be there when I arrived? He was. His car was unmistakable roaring up to the terminal in the middle of the night. We chowed down at Waffle House at 3 a.m. and took off into the misty dawn. It was to be all Blue Highways, back roads, no Interstates or chain restaurants. A copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was to be our Bible.
There at the corner of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia were more fireworks stands than we had ever seen, so of course we stocked up on M-80's and smoke bombs which we threw out of the car at suitable opportunities the rest of the trip. Of course, given the side pipes, most folks probably thought the noise and smoke had come from the car backfiring.
We were a pair of hot-shot applications engineers at a Silicon Valley start-up called Daisy with the first hint of success and money in our pockets. Buying a classic Corvette just seemed the right thing to do. We’d made a few bucks investing in our firm’s stock. It was going to the moon and everyone knew it. Our "smart" CAD software automated the design of computer chips. Previously every piece of silicon was drawn, rectangle by rectangle, by hand. Unlike old-style CAD, our radical new software understood "connectivity. Drag the rectangles that made up a transistor and the wires attaching it to others "rubber banded." It was a design innovation that allowed productivity to go completely nuts and companies like Intel to put out things like Pentium processors with tens of millions of transistors. It eliminated the thousands of layout errors that would otherwise occur. Well, most of 'em.
The damn Vette kept breaking down, first we needed a new clutch in Nashville, then a U-joint near Clarksville Kentucky. We stayed in my old college dorm in Nashville while the downtown Chevy place put in a new one, hitting music row and some of my old haunts. After seeing a movie in Clarksville we told some ladies impressed by the Corvette we were “Location Agents” for a film that was going to be shot there. That plus a little alcohol.... Seems they all knew a lake where we could film the sun rising — in the East. It had to rise over the lake “from the East.” We were VERY insistent about the sun rising in the east! They were willing to take us out and show us the lake at 2.am more than slightly inebriated. Remember, this was pre-AIDS. Good times.
What surprised us the most were all the full size satellite TV dishes springing up next to farmhouses across America. From nothing to 250+ channels with nothing but a check and a bootleg converter. Rural America had gotten wired. Well, dished. Imagine seeing Ted Turner’s 24 hour news when you were accustomed to none, for ...your entire life. The impact 24 hour news would ultimately have on middle America we couldn't have possibly forseen.
Diners and cafes were where we stopped, never McDonalds or Denny’s. You got a flavor of the town from the old men sucking coffee and the "faded glory" waitresses who should have left town a long time ago. They welcomed us and came out to chat about the car when we went to leave. The young waitress at the tiny cafe in a one-horse town in Kansas assured us “Charlie,” the Frito Lay guy, came by EVERY SINGLE DAY to refill the rack. The Internet had yet to be invented and business was still done the old fashioned way.
We followed a shiny stainless Kraft tanker truck across the loneliest highway in America, getting right on his bumper and drafting for slightly better fuel mileage. We drafted him until he locked up the brakes and turned down a deserted dirt road. Trust me. There were no cows, and no dairies down that road. We joked THAT was Area 51, back when it officially did not exist, or something else, because no “milk truck” had any business going down that dirt road. Fortunately we just missed creaming his rear bumper. The smell of his trailer tires locking up is what awakened us from our stupor, into which we were lulled by the endless roar of the 327 motor and side pipes.
I'd tell you about listening to radio preachers and country music -- " 730 on the AM dial!" all the way across the country except the side pipes on the Corvette made the radio completely useless. Tinny top 40 music was the one part of the road trip experience we missed out on.
At one point we were getting somewhere south of 7 mpg, the motor running rough and belching black smoke. A “19 year Corvette mechanic” in the middle of nowhere, Nevada, told us “No problem, one bowl on your Holley double pumper has sagged, I’ll double gasket it" He came up with a second gasket out of a box of old carburetor parts he had sitting on the shelf, in a tiny town with no Corvettes, no muscle cars left. He probably hadn’t seen a Holley or Rochester carburetor in years. It seemed at every breakdown we ran into JUST the right guy to fix the ‘64 for us, although the cast pot-metal, half-moon glove box door, which weighed at least five pounds, continued slamming into my knees all the way into San Jose. At one point I threatened to rip it off its hinges.
We were at least back into double-digit gas mileage.
Everywhere we went there was someone wanting to ask us about the Corvette or they wanted to tell us their Corvette story. Either they’d owned one, their high school friend had owned one, a relative, or else someone they knew had died in one. We listened to endless Vette stories. (As I do again today, it’s the price of admission).
A fourth and final flat occurred near Lake Tahoe, We were running for home at that point, late on our schedule. We had replaced the tires one by one, and now had a completely non-matching set made up of whatever some garage in some tiny town had lying around. They weren’t even all the same size. Headed alongside the Truckee river I heard this hiss-quiet-hiss-quiet of a leaking tire going around. By this point I was SERIOUSLY PISSED OFF Dave hadn't invested in new tires before starting this journey. Including a spare!
You can never budget enough time for a good road trip; it expands to fill the available days and weeks. You can never take too many pictures. And you can never stop as many times as you should have, for Historical Markers, funny signs, old churches, and other things to see and do en route. The ideal road trip would never end. Alas, at some point, ours had to. We were already running behind “schedule.”
We had camped a little, to the delight of hundreds of mosquitoes, but mostly stayed in cheap motels which averaged $19 a night back then. The rough ride of the Vette made a hot shower and a soft bed seem well worth $10. We avoided big towns as best we could. We looked for the smallest, curviest roads from A to B those times we were forced to consult a map. Mostly it was.... head west!
A fly fishing trip on the South Fork of the North Something river outside Denver had been the highlight of the trip, along with an impromptu TV repair at our host’s cabin. A cold solder joint was repaired with a nail, held in Vice-Grips, heated red hot over a stove burner. Made the football field on the old color TV green again. My buddy Dave, the driver and TV repair wizard who had NEVER fly fished, said “One must merely think like a fish” and pulled a trout in on his first cast. Son-of-a-bitch! Me, an experienced bait fisherman, I got skunked! All in all it was very Zen like. I had the EE degree, but Dave knew how to actually fix a TV, which, in my father’s estimation, was a far superior skill. (Nowadays a TV consists of one or two computer chips driving a big screen. Not gonna repair it with a hot nail)
We only drove one 20 mile stretch of superslab, somewhere in Utah, only ate in 3 or 4 fast food restaurants out of necessity. We had completed our mission. Coast to Coast on blue highways, 2 lanes, small towns, cafes and diners the whole way.
We learned to take the road less traveled, that there is no such place as “Lost” when you’re searching for adventure, and to take all the time we could with everyone who had a story to tell us. When you come to a fork in the road, once choice always becomes obvious. We learned to trust the Universe, as every single time we broke down, a repair expert of one sort or another appeared to help us along our way, no matter where we were on our journey or the amount of expertise needed. Like one able to pull down a dusty box full of carburetor parts and send us on our way in less time than it took to eat lunch at the diner next door.
Gratitude? Yeah. America was full of people out to share our adventure, help us along the way, encourage us, and welcome us into their little town. "I sure wish I could do what you two are doing!" we heard over and over.
And there comes Charlie right now...
Last edited by wadenelson; 03-16-2019 at 07:28 PM.
2020 Corvette of the Year Finalist (performance mods)
2019 C1 of Year Winner (performance mods)
2017 Corvette of the Year Finalist
2016 C2 of Year
2015 C3 of Year Finalist
Still have my 61 I bought 35 years ago and my 65 I bought 48 years ago. I don't fit well in the cars prior to 61. I've had 34 Corvettes from every generation. These old cars drive very well when they are properly sorted out and riding on modern radials. Not like the new stuff though. These are my 2 old ones.
wadenelson, now that's a road trip! sometime in the next few years, I've to something like on my itinerary.
that kind a trip is the best! I don't own a map, or use GPS. my weekend drives usually have no destination in mind.
since I am still working, I do have a sunday evening curfew, but am looking forward to the day when, I can just drive
with no clock or calendar dictating my direction or destination.
do you still have the '64? any more trips done or planned?
I had a 69 convertible with the hard top and side pipes, and I agree you just can't replace that feel and sound of old school cool even though it was god awful loud with those pipes right next to your head. I still miss it and have plans to get another I regret getting parting with her but at the time it was just the right thing to do. Now mine was just a 327 with a 4 speed and the side pipes yellow with black interior white top.
I still have some on dad's genes in me. my road trips tend to be just drive, and drive, and drive.
I will rarely have a destination in mind. I just love to drive. my daughter did 5,5k mile trip last may ( 9 days. ).
I just wanted to drive, she was on school break. heading from SF bay area east (nev / ore / ida / wyo / s. dak / wisc / ill / ind / oh / kent / ten / ark /
ok / tex / ari / n. mex / nev / cal ). saw some relatives in ohio, made it to the corvette museum. other I just drove. went from Memphis to the middle of
Arizona in one day ( 1,100 miles ). next time, I'm hoping to make a few more stops on the way though. I do the big roads to get to a general area, then
find those local back roads.
thanks for the inspiration!
03-15-2019, 10:37 AM
what's the oldest Corvette you've own or driven
