4 A Beetle Crawls Across America

It’s a nice, blue and sunny morning in beautiful downtown Rawlins, Wyoming. It’s not much of a town, though; one short street of small business, and a couple other main drags with many motels and hotels spread along them. (Oh yeah, and there’s several big rocks a few hundred feet high jutting out of the ground.) But at least there’s a car wash so I cleaned the bugs off the bug, and washed away the oil from the bottom of the engine where the rear main seal is leaking. It’s not leaking enough to give me a concern though because every time I check the oil, it’s still almost full. Oh, and the engine quit again just like last time but this time I discovered the real cause. The connector ends of two wires associated with the distributor and coil were touching. When I bent them away from each other, the car still didn’t start. (I was once again on the side of Highway 80.) I looked around and found a wire with an enclosed fuse going to the coil. When I checked the fuse, it was blown. I replaced the fuse with a spare one, and, voila, the bug started up again, and I haven’t had any problems again. That was 600 miles ago.

I started early yesterday because I wanted the bug to run cool through the Great Salt Lake desert. The old VWs don’t have radiators; they’re air cooled, and the cooler the air, the better. I cruised over the salt flat desert west of Salt Lake City, through light traffic in the city, then up through a mountain pass leading east. I crossed the border into Wyoming, and I almost stopped for the night at a National Park called Flaming George, which I believe was named after one of the first gay pioneers in old west. But I decided to just keep going, so here I am in Rawlins, Wyoming.

I’ve driven a total of 1,050 miles, and I have another 2,100 to go. The bug is getting about 32 miles per gallon, which came in handy through California and Nevada because the price of gasoline was as high as $3.45 a gallon. Now the price has settled to about $2.62. .