An arizona road trip
The American Southwest is virtually an open-air museum for classics
Maybe it’s soMething in the water, or the lack thereof, but the state of Arizona offers up many classic car sights right out in the open with nary a protective building or rooftop in sight. The desert climate provides an arid environment that inhibits rust, so owners think nothing of keeping classics outdoors.
While millions of visitors come to Arizona each year to see a colossal hole in the ground (aka the Grand Canyon), classic-car fans also have plenty to keep them entertained. During a nine-hour, 580-mile road-trip spread out over a few days, they can experience a wealth of seemingly random classic automotive sights, along with Arizona’s beautiful scenery.
Start your quest on America’s Mother Road: Route 66. Most people come to Petrified Forest National Park for the magnificent displays of wood that over the aeons have turned into colourful stone fossils, but road-trippers know that hidden vestiges of an early alignment of Route 66 also snake through the park. One guide to finding it is the remains of a 1932
Studebaker seemingly abandoned almost nine decades ago by a wayward traveller. Gaze at the harsh landscape and try to imagine what it was like for migrants right out of The Grapes of
Wrath in the 1930s as they headed west to escape the Great Depression for the promised opportunity of California.
Further west, travellers can sleep in a replica Native American teepee at the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook (sleepinawigwam.com). This novel motel is festooned with classic cars which are parked right outside each of the teepees.
Winslow takes its Route 66 connections seriously, with giant route markers painted on the street. Here you’ll find an intersection made famous by The Eagles’ 1972 hit Take It
Easy. The town has marked this with a statue of a folk singer (and more recently one of the late Eagles frontman Glenn Frey) staring at the object of desire in the song, a flame-red 1960 Ford flatbed pick-up truck.
If you’re peckish, a good roadside stop for an old-fashioned cheeseburger, hand-cut crisps and a malted shake is Bing’s Burger Station in Cottonwood (BingsBurgers.com). The diner is in a former Atlantic Richfield petrol station and has a 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe parked next to the Gilmore pumps outside.
Keep heading south for 215 miles to Tucson, which has become something of an open-air car museum thanks to one Truly Nolen. The pest-extermination king started parking cars around town to promote his business in the 1950s and the collection now totals more than 50, ranging from a flamboyantly tail-finned 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air to a 1923 Dodge
Roadster and a 1957 Nash Metropolitan. Amazingly, all these cars are left open for inspection; best to start your scavenger hunt of them at the company HQ on 3636 East Speedway Boulevard, Tucson, AZ 85716, where a few are parked out front.
About 100 miles south-east of Tucson by the Mexican border is the old mining town of Bisbee. Quaint shops line the historic downtown, while one section in the Lowell Historic District looks like it was abandoned in the 1950s, with all the residents fleeing and leaving their cars like a scene from a sci-fi movie. One of the more interesting tableaux among the classic cars is a circa-1955 GMC PD-4501 Scenicruiser observation coach which is parked by the vintage Texaco station. It looks as if it’s just waiting for a fill-up before the passengers board.
Bisbee also offers an opportunity to sleep in an environment inspired by mid-century transportation. In this case, you can spend a night in a vintage motorhome at The Shady Dell trailer court (theshadydell.com). There, the choice of a dozen accommodations includes a 1947 Airporter bus done up as a ‘Polynesian Palace’, a 1955 Airstream and, for the nautically inclined, a wooden 1947 Chris Craft yacht. It’s the perfect place to rest your head after a classic Arizona road trip.