Howdy friends! It’s your favorite photographer named Griffin, who works with this specific publication named The Autopian, writing a blog for you today! Isn’t that cheery?! Today’s gonna be real special though, because I’m gonna show y’all something you maybe didn’t know about: we went on a road trip! In a taxi!

Because I’m so certain the news of this trip was a complete bombshell to you, here’s a bit of background on it: We bought a New York City taxi cab from Copart for a smoking hot deal of $800 bucks. I know what you’re thinking: “A big honkin’ V8 in a fun Crown Victoria body?! Sign me up!”

That’s the totally right response to such information, to which we retort that you need to pack that smile back up and return it to sender because we don’t have a Crown Vic; we have the Nissan NV200. And did we mention it didn’t run when we got it? Yeah, all praise to King Gossin for his help in bringing it back to life.

As the self-proclaimed media deity of The Autopian, I’ve decided (rather, been ordered by the higher-ups) to show off all the best images from the trip that maybe didn’t make the cut from Torch’s daily write-ups (which you should really read if you haven’t already). Here’s some shots of our monumental journey, broken down by day, with a couple of notes along the way. Let’s do a photo!

Day Zero: The Taxi Museum

Torch was fighting generational taxi demons while trying to make his way up to Matt and me in New York, and that was a damn shame because we got the full lookaround of a really rad museum called the Taxidepot in Astoria, run by Al Gallego. Calling it a museum isn’t entirely accurate, though, because there’s also a lot of preservation of various taxi tech that Al does there, in addition to full repairing old taxi meters and meticulously prepping period correct props for different productions across the city. First photo is of the bathroom:

After entering the matrix, you immediately get hit with audio from a movie that was way before my time (anything before ’98 doesn’t exist), so I couldn’t tell you what it was from. Just know it was fun looking at taxi circuit boards while speakers laughed at you.

Here’s Al himself showing Matt the evolution of different taxi meters over the years.

There was a very photogenic plushy goat sitting on the back of a taxi that was looking cute.

Here’s a meter he repaired.

And the work station where he actually repairs them.

There isn’t much more from this zero day, so I’ll leave it with a huge shoutout to the readers who met us there and another nod to Al and his operation at Taxidepot, as well. Your generosity was greatly appreciated, and so was your wisdom.

Day One: New York to Ohio

With 12 hours of driving ahead of us, we had to get after it really early in hopes of meeting up with the readers in Plain City, Ohio. Getting out of New York was easy with very minimal traffic, but we hit some rain pretty fast in Pennsylvania, which required us to pull over and fix the windshield wipers that were in absolutely miserable condition. But here to help us is a fan of the site, A. Barth!

Highway underpasses are great places to work on a car, didn’t you know?!

The rest of the drive was long, with Matt insisting I learn more about new age popstars that are too niche for his TMD “What I’m Listening To” section, and somehow we made it there with my ears intact and my cameras ready to photograph some gorgeous readers.

There was this beautiful AMX that Torch insisted on plopping his rear end in. With how pretty the ride is, I can’t blame him.

Here’s the taxi next to the crowd and aforementioned AMX! There were also goats hanging by the cute log cabin in the back.

I thought a mod this intense could only be done by the pros at Galpin Auto Sports, but Torch found a way!

Look at you cuties.

Torch’s head is hung low from a long day of travel and the sad realization that his butt will no longer be graced by AMX’s leather seats, for his prison is the NV200, and his sentence is five more days of driving it.

This father and daughter just brought a huge smile to my face. Torch installed an old Atari in the back of the taxi to distract Otto so that he could keep spitting profanities at the plains of Middle America, and this father-daughter duo was able to spend a couple of minutes with it, too! As a force of habit with the taxi,  Torch spat profanities at them while they played, and Matt and I had to subdue him while the family evacuated.

Day Two: Ohio to Illinois

This day meant a lot to me as a massive racing fan because we made a last-minute detour to the almighty Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Okay, specifically the museum, but still.

Pictured above is an incredibly massive screen that wraps from floor to ceiling that displays videos of previous runnings of the Indy 500, with a throuple of Dallara DW-12 chassis in front to reflect the starting order of this year’s running. From left to right, it was the rookie Robert Shwartzman from Prema Racing, Takuma Sato from Rahal Letterman Lanigan, and Pato O’Ward from Arrow McLaren.

Three of the best drivers to ever do it piloted these stock cars, which really tickled me as someone who grew up at NASCAR ovals in the early 2000s.

Obviously, we had to get a photo of it in front of both the museum and the iconic pagoda.

Is this the most remarkable photo? Maybe not, but I wanted to include it as a thank you to this handy Honda Passport for kicking ass the entire trip. It was a good home for Matt and me.

And here was where we had dinner at the end of another long day of travel: Pinky’s in Lake Sara. Did they take a truly absurdly long time to bring us the food? Yeah, but they were busy from a local VW meet, and the wait gave us a chance to watch the boats rip it around the lake. I’d be pissed if they pushed us out any faster!

Day Three: Illinois to Kansas

What better way to start your day than to come out and see the jury-rigged window from your busted taxi slipping off the back from melting apoxy in the heat?!

That morning, we went to the Funfest for Air Cooled VW that I took almost no photos of, thanks to being on full video mode, but there was this Corvette museum on the grounds that activated every boneheaded neuron I have in this noggin!

If we’re being honest, it didn’t feel like the “Home of the Corvette” the way they billed it; it was really just the home of the C4 and C5. It’s also pretty morbid to have this bisected man sitting on the ground there.

Never been to St. Louis before, but it was quite lovely for the 15 minutes we found ourselves in its city limits! Hello arch! (Fun fact! It’s actually a full oval, but the other half is buried underground!)

I’m gonna be super honest, this photo made me super sad to look at again, purely because that barbecue was really frickin’ good and I would kill for some right now. Instead, I’m sitting with horrible posture in a horrible chair at a coffee shop in Sawtelle. WTF man?

The Moke above was really rad despite the fact that it broke before we were gonna take rides in it, and the fellow below with Matt and Torch was pretty darn nice, too! Shoutout to him for making it work with 11 kids and a Smart car. (No, seriously: that’s his car, and his family is that large.).

Day Four: Kansas to Colorado

Gonna be honest, this was probably the least favorite day for all of us, purely because the wind knocked us around like a sailboat in a tornado (that’s how it works, right?), and it was maybe 16 hours of travel time? It was tough. But photos are more important than our plight:

Doesn’t it look like this van is absolutely launching it out of the apex of a turn? Torch is a trash driver compared to this speed racer here.

Hey, if there’s gonna be a lot of wind, why not put a couple turbines down?!

Bad news for all you A&W doubters out there: that place is the frickin’ truth. Stop by there when you’re driving through middle America, you won’t regret it! And if you do, we’ll pay you to take the NV200 off our hands as punishment! (For legal reasons, I need to clarify I’m being very serious here, and for other legal reasons, I need to say I’m absolutely joking we would never force the NV200 on you.)

Look at all the smiles-per-mile that the taxi brought to y’all in Denver! And just gotta say, my GOD did a lot of you show up! Super warm welcome to all of us, including me as a mostly behind-the-scenes guy. Very kind folks, you Denveronians!

I didn’t realize Krypto the Superdog lived in Colorado?

If the person changing my oil doesn’t produce a filter as dirty as the one Torch is holding, I will never replace it. Give me mold or give me death. Preferably not by mold.

And shoutout to the owner of Krypto! When we introduced ourselves, he got incredibly excited that he was talking to the legendary stud of a man (me, in case that was any debate) who wrote the article about dailying a C6. Again, the kindness of you Denverinos was palpable!

One of these is the peak of Homo sapien transportation engineering, and the other is a stupid parked plane.

Cute cars and a cute couple. It makes the world go round!

And shoutout to this reader who talked a bit about working on various space programs through the years. Write up from you coming when?

Day Five: Colorado to Nevada

So this was unexpected! We met this fellow, also named Jason, on our way out of the Denver hotel, and he told us he saw the uniquely damaged taxi sitting there and thought, “Man, that looks like the NV200 those fools are driving across the country! Shame I didn’t get to meet them last night.” Well, lucky you, pal, because we met YOU at the hotel! We followed you there so we could meet you! Congrats!

Torch is desperate to drive on a runaway truck ramp. Ask him about it, I guarantee you there’s a 20-minute discussion waiting on the other end of it.

I got really happy driving through Utah because it reminded me so much of my home state of Arizona. The Colorado Plateau does a good job of making everything look a bit similar, so it really scratched the itch of some good ole southwestern deserts for me.

Un elephante.

This night in Vegas marked my second time in the city of sin, with the first time being the PAC-12 tournament I was shooting for my college in March of 2020, when the entire strip shut down almost as soon as the tourney started thanks to COVID. Your mileage may vary, but spending a week in empty Vegas during a pandemic is the best way to experience the city, second only to this roughly 12-hour turnaround we had in the taxi.

Day Six: Nevada to California

As we made our final push towards Los Angeles, we decided it was time to cut Otto some slack and take him to Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart in Vegas to see some wacky immersive art at a massive scale, which is where these first two frames are from.

This is seriously not butter.

The drive between Vegas and LA blended into each other for the most part, especially on account of its short duration. As we got closer to the city, though, a sad reality hit us: we no longer had to stare at the back of a taxi that was adorned with a protective amulet of a hotel fork that was stolen at some point in the previous 3,000 miles of travel. At least the amulet worked, because the two Torchs light continued all the way to…

Galpin! Where one 2014 Nissan we own could meet another of the same year!

Obviously, we had to take over the Red Room for dinner at the always incredible Horseless Carriage. (Fun fact, the room isn’t red and is actually an oval buried deep underground!)

Would it be a meetup without a photo of you gorgeous people?

David wasn’t even talking about this dog toy; he just didn’t want to be on camera that day, so he kept trying to throw it at my camera lens.

I think Torch’s smile says it all here. It was a long, exhausting journey, but one filled with a lot of laughs, wisdom, crass jokes, a stop at Room Forty, and a couple hundred gigs of photos and video that we can only hope brings y’all some pleasure.

I thank all of you again for the hospitality and enthusiasm because we really couldn’t do it without you. Okay, maybe we could, but it would be significantly less fun that way.

To download and see more photos from the meetups, click here. Vegas readers especially should click that; the rollers of your cars on the strip are in there!

All photos (except that one right up above there): Griffin Riley