375,000 Mile Taxi Trek Day 5: Made It To A Mile High (Vegas Or Bust!)

I’m so tired, and tomorrow is going to be a long, long day. Today we went from Lawrence, Kansas to Denver, Colorado, and our improbably-plucky ex-NYC taxi with well over 375,000 hard-earned taxi miles has performed astonishingly well. So well that I find myself fishing around under the seats for a magical monkey’s paw, or something similar that would both explain my astounding fortune and help prepare me for the inevitable and probably ironic consequences. But I think this yellow workhorse is just a determined machine!

Really, the thing has been driving wonderfully. It’s been swallowing so many miles with so little complaint – at least, no complaints I haven’t been able to effectively ignore – that I can’t help but feel proud of this funny-looking little taxi-van.

Tomorrow, however, will be a real challenge as we tackle the Rocky Mountains, which, combined with the thinner air at altitude that robs engines of power, will prove to be a genuine test of machine and me, meat and metal. But let’s be honest: the taxi will be doing most of the work here, and I hope it can make it through okay. These mountain passes are no joke.

Today’s drive wasn’t bad at all, really, with only one significant issue that caused us to stop: the heat had cooked and melted away the adhesive holding in our rear window, which began to flap around, alarmingly.

We pulled over and fixed it with some nice strong tape (it claims to be 10x the strength of duct tape, emotionally) and so far it seems to be staying in place. It would really suck if we lost the rear window, especially in this heat.

We also recorded a little tour of the air conditioner setup, which has been working great despite being shockingly fractionally-assed, by me:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Autopian (@theautopian)

It was really quite a lovely drive, overall, with the landscape having the look of that famous Windows desktop image, deeply saturated blue skies and green land. I put some Windows icons and a window over a shot out of my driver’s side window (too many uses of the word “window” here) so you can see what I mean:

Stopping for gas revealed some interesting local automotive fauna, including this very badass International Scout:

Other stops provided more interesting artworks to ponder. Like this mosaic of what looks like an early ’50s Hudson, or maybe Chevy?

I also liked this mural; it’s more ornithologically focused than automotively, but still:

More importantly, though, I saw evidence that America’s novelty sticker industry is in fantastic shape, and may be even experiencing a sort of boom right now:

It appears that sticker researchers have cracked the code to add asses to ordinary, everyday objects, ranging from a Lego block, a watermelon, a coffee pot, and even what appears to be an Erlenmeyer flask. It looks like currently 22 objects have been enbuttockified, and I would suspect that asses-on-things researchers are tirelessly working to improve that number.

Also, it appears that junk food and fecal matter are being combined in bold new ways, and I salute these determined efforts in the field, which has the potential to dramatically increase the quality of life for all Americans.

Even more important than poop stickers, if one can imagine such a thing, was the incredible reader meetup we had in the parking lot of the Wings Over the Rockies air and space museum. Look how many people showed up! And they brought fantastic cars! And they were all so kind and charming and wonderful!

Look at this ’82 Volkswagen Rabbit! It was immaculate and had fetching stripes and was a diesel, even. I think these had about 50 hp, and got about the same number in miles per gallon. I feel like I forgot just how appealing and tidy the first-generation Rabbit design was, seen here with the iconic Late Cold War Era Car Face, which was a US-market exclusive.

This Mazda RX-7 was beautiful, too, coming from Alaska and yet remaining incredibly rust-free. Another extremely tidy and appealing ’80s design.

Look at the engine in this RX-7! It’s a rotary, of course, but one that has gone 65,000 miles without needing new apex seals!

Look at this, though: a 1973 Mustang in a stunning shade of David Hockney pool-painting blue and a white vinyl top. This car was absolutely immaculate, and has a tone quite different from what one normally expects from a Mustang. It’s somehow more stylish and seemingly erudite than most Mustangs?

This also may be the best use of a vinyl top on a car that I’ve ever seen. Part of why it works so well is because this was a dealer-installed vinyl top, and unlike the factory vinyl top which ended close to the rear window, this one continues down and back, following those twin buttresses of the roof, making for a significantly more dramatic look.

This is the couple that owns this fantastic car, and they seem to enjoy every mote of that Smurfically-blue Mustang. It felt great to see this car and its proud owners, and I’m so honored they brought it out today.

There were so many fantastic Autopians there, and, incredibly, they all seemed to be thrilled to see this cab. Some were even so thrilled that they teamed up to fix the taxi’s windshield washer!

Man, it’s nice being able to see out of that windshield again. I bet I’ll be needing a nice clean windshield tomorrow, when I’m slogging up that mountain on one side and barreling down the other.

I better get to bed. Tomorrow we hope to be meeting at the Harbor Freight, Rainbow Boulevard and probably getting some Persian at the place nearby. However, to be safe, assume we’ll get there around 8:00 pm because we don’t know how miserable it may be going over the Rockies!

All great photos: Griffin Riley, all others iPhone author shots