Detour #210: From Sea to Shining Sea: Across America in a bonkers British sports car
Eccentric automotive adventurer Ben Coombs crossed the USA from New York to San Francisco in his topless TVR.
There’s a saying which goes along the lines of, ‘you only get out of life, what you put in,’ and while it’s a fine motto to live life by, it applies equally well to road trips. The effort required to make some big automotive odyssey happen can be huge, but it pays to remember that the rewards will come once you hit the road.
This was very much the backdrop to the preparations for the US leg of ‘Pub2Pub’, my TVR-based, 27,000 mile trip across the globe. There was trans-Atlantic shipping to be arranged, customs officials to be pacified and temporary import documents to procure. Then the questions of insurance, port fees and schedules had to be considered. Flights had to be booked, routes planned and the car delivered to the Port of Southampton on time. And, as there were five of us making the trip, and only two seats in the TVR, a second car needed to be bought – a fittingly V8-powered Dodge Charger, sourced from a used car lot in New York. It was a lot of work, and there were moments during the preparation when we found ourselves wondering whether it would ever be worth the effort. But within minutes of collecting the TVR from the Port of New Jersey on that sunny August morning, I knew the answer.
Rolling onto the highway in the only TVR Chimaera in the US, the roof down and the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline flashing past the windows, was enough to dispel the doubts. This was bucket list stuff, a serious life tick.
And it was only the beginning of the TVR’s extended vacation on the American landmass. Under a continuous barrage of camera phones and thumbs up from appreciative locals in colossal pick-ups, we put the New York skyline in our rear view mirror and set off west, aiming to complete what is possibly the most celebrated of all road trips. New York to San Francisco. From sea to shining sea, our very own Cannonball Run.
Unlike real Cannonball Runners we weren’t in a hurry, and so rather than heading west at warp speed, we cruised on down to Washington DC to take in the sights – the White House, Capitol Hill, the Smithsonian, the Washington Monument. All the big tourist spots. Because after getting the car across the Atlantic, we figured we’d earned a holiday. And as no driving holiday is complete without some decent roads, we then headed up to West Virginia’s Skyline Drive, and onward across the Appalachian Mountains. The tarmac was smooth, flowing with perfection across the forested hills and sometimes gifting us glorious views out across the West Virginian countryside far below. Unfortunately however, we had plenty of time to admire the views, as these most glorious of driving roads lie smothered beneath a 35mph speed limit – a double frustration as we were very much in a race against the clock; a race against the heavens themselves, in fact.
We’d planned our drive to coincide with a total eclipse of the sun, which would be occurring in Tennessee as we passed through, and we won our race against the sun by a few hours, making it to the centre of totality shortly before one of nature’s most ethereal spectacles began. The sky darkened, the air chilled and the insects fell silent, before darkness swept over us, yielding a few minutes later as the sun blazed out from behind the moon once again, and the gin-clear sky began its journey from black back to blue.
Sometimes, nature is pretty awesome.
We continued west, striking out along the I-40, the two lane blacktop rumbing to the V8 tune as we soaked up the American South. Distances were huge and for day after day, our transatlantic convoy burbled across the dustbowl plains of Arkansas and Oklahoma, closing with the iconic Route 66 before reaching Amarillo. There, we dropped into a grassroots Sunday morning drag racing event and ran the quarter mile, our street machines proudly logging the slowest times of the day in the process.
They take their drag racing pretty seriously in the Texas panhandle.
After Texas, the landscape got its game on, morphing into the American West we all know from a thousand movies. And we weren’t afraid to tick off a few clichés. Such as going roof off in Monument Valley, that picture-postcard of the American West which has provided a cinematic backdrop for everything from Easy Rider to Forrest Gump. And that was just the start of our film-like existence. The days which followed saw our exhaust noise echoing off the walls of Zion Canyon, our tyres cruising nonchalantly down the Las Vegas strip and our sci-fi curiosity being satisfied by a trip to Rachel, Nevada, a one-UFO kinda town which is tucked away next to Area 51 and provides a safe haven to many an alien conspiracy theory.
Death Valley was next. That’s Death Valley in midsummer. All 50°C of it, and hence the toughest test yet for the TVR. However, ignore the naysayers – TVR were building their cars pretty well back in the late ‘90s. Blackpool’s finest took the arid, salty landscape in its stride, with no overheating and little in the way of complaints when faced with its first corrugated desert tracks of the trip. The same couldn’t be said of its occupants, however, as we sweated our way through a succession of appealingly-named places, from Badwater Basin to Furnace Creek.
Yosemite then loomed beyond the horizon, and the combination of heat and dryness had conspired to turn it into a tinderbox, before setting it alight. The road swept upwards through an eerie landscape of smoke-eddied silence and that awesome symbol of the park – El Capitan – rose up to merge with the smoke-clouds, through which even the Californian sun struggled to shine.
And then the soaring cliffs and billowing smoke were behind us. We dropped down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to San Francisco, where we cruised across the Golden Gate Bridge before parking beneath it, our trip from sea to shining sea complete.
And as we leaned against our trusty old TVR and new-world Dodge, four weeks after the TVR had cleared customs in New Jersey, we knew all the effort in making our US road trip happen had been worth it. That saying about only getting out of life what you put in? When it comes to making your life-long road trip dreams happen, we can certainly vouch for it.
Words & Photography Ben Coombs Twitter | Instagram