Trip from Albuquerque to Flint Michigan, July 2003
Click here for daily trip log
Introduction
The Buick Club of America is sponsoring its national meet this year in Flint, Michigan, the original home of Buick. This year is the centennial for Buick Motor Company.
Since we have a
recently restored 1927 Buick Master (check out the photo gallery for more
pictures and information about this car), we thought it would be nice to bring it to
nationals this year. We were going to trailer it until we
thought about the logistics. This particular 1927 Buick is a tall, large,
heavy car, it weighs 4500 pounds. We have a few friends with trailers
large enough to carry this car, but we realized we needed to borrow or rent a
tow vehicle as well. We considered using Nance's wonderful original '64 Ford half ton
pick. But pulling a load like this requires
a substantial pickup, probably a 3/4 ton at least. The trailer will need
electric brakes and probably a fifth wheel set up. Equipping the little
Ford pickup with all this stuff looked like a daunting task and the fact is the
truck is too small and semi-retired to be up to this task. Yes, we could
borrow or rent a larger pickup, but we are very cheap except when it comes to
spending money on our old cars.
So why not drive the '27 Buick to Flint? As time went on, this option seemed to make more sense and sounded like it could be fun. Many years ago Bill and some friends went to the Buick Nationals in Atlanta, and saw a family had driven all the way from California in a Buick of similar vintage.
There are many caravans of Buicks going to Flint and we thought about joining one. Most of the caravans involved far newer cars. We have driven our Buick enough to know that its top cruising speed is only around 45 mph. And that is under the best of conditions. Travel on interstate highways is out of the question, except for short rural sections and emergencies. Add a few hills and hot weather, and cruising speed drops significantly. Frequent stops are needed to add water and let the engine cool. The headlights and taillights are marginal, so night driving is not really much of an option. In short, we are not very compatible with most caravan situations. Obviously, if we knew of another '27 Buick or similar car, we could suffer together, but we couldn't find any traveling companions for this particular trip. We thought about bringing a support vehicle to follow, but Nance and I wanted to enjoy the tour together. This is hard to do when driving separate cars. In the end, the best option was driving without a safety net, we knew that friends and car collectors would help us if we needed it.
Route
Our route is designed to get us to Flint fairly directly while avoiding interstate highways. Getting out of New Mexico is a bit of a problem because many of the rural roads have been eliminated by I-25 and I-40. We did find a way north through Santa Fe, Taos, and two the east through Raton and Clayton. From Clayton we will proceed northeast through western Oklahoma and Kansas. A key waypoint in central Kansas is McPherson. This is the home of the "College of Car Restoration" where we can probably find help for repairs or maintenance if needed. We also know a collector in nearby Hutchinson who has '16 and '22 Buicks and probably a few spare parts as well.
Following McPherson, we will proceed to Ft. Leavenworth, where Bill lived in the early 50's with his military family. From there we will proceed to the northeast through many small towns in northwestern MO. We will end up going north on US 65 towards Des Moines, IA. From their we will angle towards the east passing near Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and finally Madison, WI. In Madison we are going to visit a few days with our wonderful niece Kelly McCloskey-Romero, her husband Ricardo, and 18 month old daughter Celeste. We may also meet some friends in Madison from California and Washington DC who are also traveling to Flint.
The last feature of this voyage will be a voyage. We planning to cross Lake Michigan at Manitowoc on the steam ship Badger. The Badger will take us to Ludington, MI, about 150 miles from Flint. From there, we are hoping to find some nice rural Michigan roads to take us to Flint.
We are hoping to complete this entire trip on secondary roads. We think this will be possible except for travel around some of the congested areas. The Buick can go 45 MPH if pushed, so we can ride an interstate if needed. We plan on driving about 200 miles per day. If the car is running well and we are comfortable, we will go farther. But we anticipate downtime and some days are going to go better than others.
We are going to try to keep a daily log on our trip, assuming the car runs well enough to give us some time in the evenings to write a log and upload it. Follow this link to see our daily reports. Thanks for joining us!