Wonderful Drive Through the South
Five Days Outing with the Noted Racing Driver Harris Hanshue
"It looked more like a torpedo boat than a motor car," says Harry C. Carr in the Los Angeles Times.
"Harris Hanshue, the former race driver, said he had come to take me for a little ride to try a new car. Before we got back we had traveled over 500 miles; climbed mountains, swam mud holes, clung to the edge of precipices, plowed through deserts and raced a train.
"'Some car,' announced Hanshue, briefly, as we ended the trip at the end of the fifth day.
"We started on Friday before the San Diego automobile races. It is not very much to the credit of the State Highway Commission that the worst roads, we found on the whole trip were between Los Angeles and San Diego.
"As long as we were on the county boulevards it was wonderful going. But the detours around boulevards now under construction are something fierce. At one point where the temporary road skirts another temporary road and climbs up a steep hill so muddy that it was like traveling through dough, I wanted to turn back and quit the trip, but Hanshue just grunted, threw in the intermediate, and the little old torpedo boat slid through the mud like a turtle.
"We got into San Diego late in the afternoon, and as the auto races happened the next day, we felt in duty bound to go. To my mind, one of the finest cures for insomnia is an auto race. The idea of an auto race is that several cars start around a road, and they keep going around and around, and after several hours a man in puttees waves a checkered flag and you rouse yourself to discover that one of the cars got around before the other car did. It is about as thrilling as adding up a butcher's bill.
"The automobile editor, in the press stand across the track, sent over a message, asking Hanshue and me to try to look less bored; we were crabbing the show.
"That night at the hotel we fell in with some really charming young men from Imperial Valley—young men of the type who are turning the desert into a wonder land. They wanted to show us around a little; so early the next morning we turned the nose of the little torpedo boat to the south out over the Campo Mountain road.
"It was the beginning of one of the most interesting trips I ever traveled. I recommend it as the best auto tour in California. You slip along mountain roads, through queer little mountain towns with strange Indian names, where the village wiseacres stop whittling long enough to wave to you as you go by.
"It is a splendid road; one of the mysteries is why the State Highway Commission should spend a small fortune, needed on so many other roads, to make this one over again.
"We had started about 9 o'clock. Toward noon we were hanging on to a little wrinkle of a road that cut into the mountain side. Hanshue on his side of the car could look down over the edge of the precipice and spit into a far valley beneath. I extended my fervent inward thanks to the factory for having built a car with a left hand drive. When we started down the mountain on the other side and I hung over the edge myself, I made up my mind that the left hand drive wasn't so much after all. In one of the Phoenix races Hanshue broke his lighting system and raced over this road in the dark.
"At noon we stopped at Campo, an attractive little settlement guarded by cavalrymen. The international line divides the town. You eat lunch in Mexico, at the excellent little inn, and take on gas, if you want any, a hundred yards away in the United States.
"From Campo we scudded down through a meadow valley, past more little cross road towns; then we began to climb again.
"One of the most extraordinary features of this trip was the number of cars on the road. From the time we left Los Angeles until we returned we were never out of sight of an automobile. Between San Diego and Imperial Valley the road fairly wriggled with them.
"Climbing the grade beyond Campo we came suddenly around the shoulder of a hill and a most wonderful panorama stood out before us as though some one had raised a curtain. In the foreground were the desert hills—ash of roses and gray under the desert sun—and beyond—Imperial Valley—the "wine dark flats below"—and beyond the valley the thin blue line of the distant mountains.
"Then began the long coast down the Mountain Springs grade. To show you the number of autos on the road, when we passed through Mountain Springs, five cars were drawn up in front of the store.
"The geological formations are astonishing on this part of the road. The rocks look like mountains of twisted molasses candy.
"Coming out through the pass and then into the open valley above Coyote Wells, we passed a big grading camp where the State Highway Commission is blasting out a crease in the rocks for an altogether unnecessary road on the opposite side of the canyon from the splendid road already there. A squirrel would have the time of his life at the headquarters of the State Highway Commission.
"Near Coyote Wells we passed the line of the new Arizona-to-California railroad. They began building the road seven or eight years ago, and by the time seven or eight more years have passed, more of the road will have been built. If the supply of years doesn't give out, San Diego may have a new road some day.
"From Coyote Wells to El Centro, the boulevard is like a cement walk. In the days of his road racing, Hanshue told me how he used to plough through thick sand on this stretch.
"We only stayed a few minutes in El Centro, and hurried on to Brawley, where we arrived in time for dinner. We left again the next morning for Los Angeles by way of Calipatria.
"The latter is the newest town in the desert, but one of the best ever built in a new country. Its fine new buildings look as though they had just been taken out of the box.
"While we were in Calipatria, the village cut-up was giving an exhibition of fancy horsemanship on the main street, whirling a big riata around his head and tearing up and down like a wild man. The game finally began to pall on the broncho. He humped up his back and made two stiff legged jumps, and the village daredevil picked up the pieces of himself and retired, much crest-fallen, followed
