I've had an idea in my head for a long time - decades. This post is me watering the seed to get the ball rolling. As the saying goes, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." This is that step. Timing is unknown - could be months, could be years. I'm just committing to myself that this is happening.
The background:
In the spring of 1988 I was hit by a drunk driver and ended up laid up for a bit with a broken back and a bunch of other relatively minor injuries. The back was minor as those things go and I had the benefit of youthful invincibility on my side. I was driving my stepfather's brand new S10 pickup and was broadsided by a big Ford LTD wagon. My grandfather had just passed the day prior - it was a challenging time for my folks.
In the weeks following the accident, I had this misguided idea that I was going to receive some kind of large insurance settlement that would "change my life." As it turned out, the driver of the LTD had no insurance and no assets. She drank herself underground a few years after my accident. Anyway, while I was laid up, I spent a lot of time daydreaming and thinking about what I was going to do with that windfall. The idea that rose to the top was to buy a C3 or C4 Corvette and do a Route 66 style open ended road trip with my buddy Brian. We envisioned that we'd travel from small town to small town, working odd jobs along the way as needed. In a time of no internet and terrible daytime TV options, daydreaming about that trip occupied a significant portion of my recovery time. It was going to be epic. Reality came knocking and the trip never happened. I was fortunate to more or less heal completely and a lot of life has happened since then.
I've never let go of the idea, and have had a serious case of wanderlust for my entire adult life. I've been fortunate to have road-tripped all over the country and have driven to all lower 48 United States. My wife and I did our first cross country road trip in 2001 with just an atlas and almost no plan. I've done the road tripping. I have New Balance sneakers. I have a pair of jean shorts. I just haven't ever gotten around to getting that Corvette.
I lost touch with my buddy Brian in the 90s. I looked for him online and on social media over the years with no luck. At a get together with old friends last summer, I heard that Brian had passed away. That gnawed at me so I really dug in to try to find any confirmation. I was able to track him down several months later and he was, in fact, still on the right side of the dirt. He'd had a bad construction accident and then a tough battle with brain cancer - either could have been the source of the rumor that he'd passed. In one of our catch up phone conversations last fall the idea of the Corvette trip came up. I'm not sure that I'd be interested in having him join me on a trip today, but it was nice catching up and having a laugh about those childhood plans. The idea has been smoldering in my head since that call.
So here we are.
Having driven to all of the lower 48, I've been saying for years that my first retirement trip is going to be a road trip to Alaska. As cool as it would be, doing that trip in a Corvette is not ideal for my wife, and that's a trip that I'd like her to enjoy too. My current thought is to find a Corvette and do a fly and drive road trip over the course of a week or two. It's not the same, but it'll check the box and scratch the itch. The ideal find would be either an '88, as it was new when this idea was born, or a '78-'82 which would have been my second choice back then. Yeah, I know, they're terrible. I could do an earlier C3 or other year C4 without too much internal compromise. My neighbor has a little-used C5 convertible (50th anniversary?) that he promises he'd make me a screaming deal on, but the C5 just doesn't push the right nostalgia buttons for this idea. I could change my mind if the deal was that good.
That's all for now. I need to thin my herd and my spring/summer is already pretty packed. Best case would probably be something happening this fall. I'm going to "keep an eye out" and see what might fall into place.
