Grand Adventure-Part One

The radio just forecast rain for the weekend starting tomorrow. They tell me around here, near Seattle, that it is what is expected during November. It has rained every day for a part of the day since we arrived here last Saturday. That is has rained here in the valley but the mountains surrounding the Town of Monroe Washington are all now snow capped.

We finally got on the road after a delay installing the solar systems, the new converter/inverter/charger in the coach. So our planned leisurely drive across route 30, the Lincoln Highway, fell by the wayside due to commitments made earlier to visit with relatives on specific dates.

But we did indeed travel on interesting portions of the old highway. The Lincoln Highway was the brainstorm of Carl Fisher a wealthy business man from Detroit. Fisher was not a stranger to big projects as it was he who built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and promoted a race that became the Indy 500, the largest one day sporting event in the world drawing a half a million people.

Fisher rounded up a large group of wealthy industrialist to seed the project and get it started. The one notable holdout was Henry Ford who claimed that a national coast to coast road should be funded by the government not private investment. That seams strange to me as Ford would have benefited greatly from the road.

We left rural west central New Hampshire and wound our way to Pennsylvania Dutch Country where we picked up route 30, the Lincoln Highway. The route actually starts at Times Square in New York City, but we decided that 38 feet of coach and 20 feet of car trailer was not a good choice of vehicle to venture into the big apple.

The highway was originally graveled with certain section, near what Fisher considered significant towns, paved. These sections were a mile long and called “seed miles.”

Today the highway is all paved and in some places the new alignment of the road shares some interstate highways, but more on the later. In Pennsylvania the road switches back and forth between two and four lane. Once west of Gettysburg Pennsylvania things get real interesting.

Outside of Gettysburg you encounter Cashtown, yep that’s right that is its real name. The owner of the Cashtown Tavern told us that in the day around the Civil War it was the only inn on the route and it was known far and wide that the only form of payment that the tavern keeper would accept was cash. Hence if you are going to that town you had better have cash, hence Cashtown. The Cashtown Inn was a favorite meeting place for Confederate Generals.

Heading further west we were in for a real shock as the road had grades that were more severe than we encountered running though the Cascades later in the trip. We ran into more that one long grade both up and down of 10%. The long grades out west that RV drivers write about for the most part are only 5%. The top peak on that section of road tops out at about 3,100 feet.

These grades were the most challenging for the entire trip. At the top of a down hill run there are signs, “trucks stop and check brakes”. This also started the down hill with controlled speed and the gear box in a lower gear. On these grades I was happy to have brakes on the trailer and crawled down the grades at 25 miles per hour max and the gear box in low gear.

I just cannot imagine Model T Fords climbing these grades and then depending on the two wheel brakes common on that era car crawling down the other side.

We made a stop at the Lincoln Highway Museum in Ligonier Pa. picking up more pointers about the road. At that point we switched to the interstates to make tracks for the first of the family obligations in Rockford Illinois.

We dry camped most of the way and the new electrical conversion including the solar panels worked like a champ. To this point we have not fired the generator up once and we have had the luxury of 120 volt service for the coffee point, toaster, and microwave.

Stay tuned next week for a dash to Kansas and more of the Lincoln Highway.
Brad & Lucy