I bought a 1976 Dodge Streetvan from Jack Baron in 1996. He had it since high school and tricked it out in 70's style with wood paneling and red shag carpet. It had a 318 engine with a 3-speed on the floor, side pipes and sixties on it. The custom paint had "Sheer Indulgence" painted on the back door. It had a bed with red velvet and a deluxe bar with mirror and refrigerator. It was a total party machine. It was so much fun to drive around. If you cruised down the street at just the right speed, the side pipes would set of a trail of car alarms and it had chrome air horns that would wake the dead.
Mayela and I took it on a trip out west to tour the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1998. My brother Travis was out in Fort Collins with James Chisholm for Brew Fest, so we met up with them to drive down to Pikes Peak for the annual hill climb race. We camped near the entrance and as we were driving around looking for a site, the 1st/reverse shift lever broke off my transmission. There is a stud on the shift shaft that broke and the lever was just hanging down off the linkage. We pushed it into the site and I got under it with some tools to figure out what to do. I cleaned up the shaft with brake cleaner and used two-part epoxy to glue it back on.
The Pikes Peak Hill climb is an annual event over the Fourth of July weekend and it is the only time you can camp on Pikes Peak. The road up to the summit is west of Colorado Springs and starts at 6,000 feet and rises up to the summit at 14,440 feet. It is the highest road in the U.S. As we were going up, the van started running like crap because of the altitude and traffic. I had to keep it in first gear and keep the engine revved up when we were stopped for traffic. By the time it got to 12,700 feet, it would barely run so we pulled into the next lot to find a camping spot. There was a guy in the road waving us to stop and pay, but, I blasted the air horn and gunned it past him till I got to the crest in the road. As soon as I stopped, it died. We went and paid the guy we'd almost run down and coasted down to a good spot.
Our camping site was pimpin'. I had a roll of carpet and a tarp so we made a living room outside the van with lawn furniture, a table, everything. James drove down in his Jeep with Travis, so we all loaded up and went to the summit. The road snakes back and forth with no guard rails and "blue sky" corners. If you went off one of these, it is nothing but drop off and rocks for thousands of feet. How these people can get up the balls to take these corners at race speed is beyond me. The bottom half of the road is paved, but a mile above our camp site, the road turns into dirt with a washboard surface and potholes everywhere. It was snowing at the summit, In July! When we got back, James was sick from the sudden change in altitude. He just layed on the lounge chair with a pale green hue. Travis was trying to make him sick and finally said to him "Hay James, you want some Corn Flakes with mayonnaise?" James ran for the bushes and hurled.
The next day was race day and people lined the course in anticipation. We took turns riding around on the BMX bike that James had brought. Then the cops caught me on the road and threatened to arrest me and throw everyone else out. Still, it was beautiful and sunny. The course marshals finally came up the road in parade style with lights and sirens blaring to clear the course and start the race. Every kind of vehicle runs in this race. There are 4-wheelers, motorcycles, flat trackers, stock cars, rally racers, trucks, semi-tractors, dirt bikes, everything. The most impressive machine was the CCI freightliner semi. It came around the corner we were sitting at, drifting, with smoke boiling off all 8 drive wheels. It was awesome.
We camped that night and left in the morning with Travis to take him back to South Carolina. I still had a couple friends in New Mexico that I wanted to visit. In Raton, there is a cutoff from Interstate 25 to Angel Fire where Deana Larkin was living. It was just about dusk and we started down Route 64 when a piece of crap pickup truck pulled out in front of us and just putted along at 25 MPH. It is a long no passing zone down to a railroad trestle, so I just stayed back patiently because there was a car behind me that looked suspiciously like a cop. I knew the road was straight and legal to pass just beyond the trestle, so I held back a little more and started to gain speed. Once the truck saw what I was doing he tried to speed up, but I sailed past him. So did the cop. He tailed us for 20 minutes and I just did the speed limit. Finally, he turned on the lights and pulled us over. He came up to the window and took the license and registration back to the car. He came back like 20 minutes later with some excuse about the registration being for a station wagon. After some time and discussion, he finally let us go. The whole thing was an obvious setup since the pickup pulled off and turned around as soon as both cars passed him. After we got going again, I had totally forgotten about Travis in the back. We looked back and he was white as a ghost. Turns out he had a bench warrant for a ticket that he didn't pay. Good thing we didn't get searched.
We camped in Ute national forest and went to find Deana in the morning. Spent a couple hours with her and headed for Albuquerque to visit my friend Roy. He was my best friend from the Military and still lived there working for the Albuquerque Police Department. This trip was really turning out to be a cop adventure. While Roy was at work, I took Travis to visit some of the best skateboarding ditches in the world. Whoever designed the drainage system there put perfect transition in all the ditches. There is one ditch called Holiday where you can skate 13 miles, all the way to the river. Concussions is just below the tram up to Sandia Summit, so we went up there to see it. I had reminded Travis a hundred times to be careful of the side pipes getting out. Sure enough, he sizzled a couple bacon strips off of his calves getting out. The pipes we so hot that his skin stuck to the metal.
For some reason I can't remember, we had duct taped a pink flamingo to the air horns in Fort Collins. Roy warned us that it would attract a lot of attention. Travis, Mayela and I voted to keep the pink flamingo for our journey back to South Carolina to drop Travis off. We were able to make it to the eastern edge of Oklahoma and camped at a park there with a lake. We were exhausted and had a nice dinner and a good sleep. The next day, It was back to driving. By 11 AM it was already in the triple digits. Just as we crossed the border into Arkansas, I saw an unmarked trooper in the median under a bridge. He didn't pull out so we thought nothing of it. A couple minutes later, he was right behind the van with the lights on. We pulled over and he took the license and registration back to his vehicle. About 10 minutes later he came back and gave me a warning for following too close. Then he asked if he could take a look around in the van. I said no. Then he said he was going to walk his dog around the outside of the van and everybody had to get out. I left it running and got out, walked around to the passenger side and let Mayela out and closed the door. I opened the side door and let Travis out and closed the door. He told us to go sit on the grass by the side of the road and wait. We did. After he walked the dog around, he put it back in his car and motioned me to come over. He had me stand behind the van so I would be on camera. He said his dog had alerted and asked if he could search my van. I said no, again. The he said "so, you don't mind if I search." I said "look, I am not, and will not give you permission to search my vehicle." He looked at me for a second, and then said "well, I'm going to search it anyway." It took him all of 1 minute to find the bong, but there was absolutely no pot in the entire vehicle. We had smoked the very last of it and scraped the bong the night before. He took everything out of the vehicle and had his dog walk around it. During this, another marked unit pulled up behind him. I thought to myself, we are busted, there is transport. Both cops spoke for a few minutes and then motioned for me to come over. The search cop said to me "Mr. Siemer, we have a problem here. Any quantity of drugs, including residue is a felony in this state. You can do one of two things. You can destroy this or--" I didn't even wait for number two. I walked over to the side of my van and took the port potty out of the trash bag we kept it in for transport. I put the 2 foot glass bong in it, took a crescent wrench out of my tool box and smashed the living crap out of it. I thought to myself, I've broken these before and was sad. This is the first time I've broken one intentionally and enjoyed it. Mayela and Travis had come over by the van and asked me "what do we do." I told them to get in the van, shook the hand of both cops, and made it a point to peel out leaving the scene. At the next gas stop we threw all the debris away. Then I remembered we had pot brownies in the cabinet. We scarfed them all down to "destroy the evidence."
Back on the road, we ran into a traffic jam on Interstate 40 and pulled off to take a break. It just happens that this was Rogers Arkansas, home of the first Wal Mart in the U.S. This place was huge. It was like a small city with opticians, Mc Donalds, a hairdresser, automotive repair, a supermarket, department store, etc. They are common now, but this was the first one we had ever seen. I went right to the freezer section and hugged a 5 gallon tub of ice cream. I wanted to lie down in one of the display freezers and use a bag of crinkle cut fries as a pillow. Travis bought this cool little spray bottle with a fan on it. He called it the Mexican air conditioner. We used this thing all the way back to South Carolina. When we were in Tennessee, the rear differential began making noise and there was a lot more backlash in the driveline. I drove very carefully the rest of the way to Travis's house. When we got there, I made some calls to the local junk yards for a used rear end. We found one and I spent a day working on it in the driveway. It was so hot; I could only work for about 15 minutes, and then go inside to cool off. I couldn't get the U-bolts off, so I used Travis's skill saw to cut them with a carbide blade. It killed his blade, but got the job done. On the way home, we went up the outer banks and camped on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. My new axle and transmission made it all the way back to New York.