HaveKidsWillTravel

The oldest continually produced line of vehicle – and one of the biggest ever in production – the Suburban has been an American automotive icon since 1935 – driven by soccer moms, the Police, Fire Chiefs, and the Secret Service – even the President gets driven around in a black Suburban. Think of the biggest SUV you’ve seen on the road outside the USA, then add an extra row of seats, and you’ve got a fairly accurate picture. Over its production life, Chevy has attempted to export it to dozens of countries – but none of whom have known exactly what to do with such a ludicrously huge, gas-guzzling behemoth when it gets there – and so it has remained a uniquely American phenomenon.

See, the downside with renting our Winnebago was that sooner or later, we were going to have to bring it back, and after 3 months and over 10,000 miles travelling up the West coast to Alaska and back again, the time had come. Still, we had a long way to travel to get the rest of the way across the country, and checking out the price of air-fares, and figuring that cars are cheap, guessed that buying a vehicle might be the best way of getting us all there. After a bit of homework, it seemed that San Diego seemed to be a pretty good place to buy a used car, and after looking at the amount of stuff we had accumulated over the past 3 months, figured that we were going to need something substantial to haul it all in – hence the suburban.

Not knowing much about anything, I’d done a bit of googling, and really just started at the bottom of the market and spent four days steadily working my way upmarket to find the cheapest thing likely to get us across the country. Now good cars are pretty much the same, but cheap cars can be wrong in many different ways, and so I found myself white knuckled and dripping with fear in cars with binary accelerators (either off or ON!), spewing plumes of white exhaust smoke (‘aah, that’s just condensation, man’) and Frankensteins (‘um, I didn’t think these were ever made with a 6 cylinder?’ – ‘No, this is a special!‘).

So after a process of eliminating everything lifted, lowered, repainted with a spray-can or with inexplicable blood-stains in the trunk, I settled for the neatest, straightest looking instance of the genre I could find for a couple of grand. A ’98 5.7litre small block v8 with a few obvious aesthetic defects (the paintwork has a bit of Californian sunburn), but it starts, stops and turns corners, the tyres look ok, the a/c works, it has no rust, makes no odd clunking noises or weird smells and doesn’t leak any vital fluids, so to my limited mechanical mind, seems as good a bet as anything else I’ve seen.

So we loaded it up with 3 kids, 4 bikes, strapped on all our possessions, and – feeling just a little like Tom Joad – hit the highway, out into the desert, and onto the remnants of the mother road. Chicago, here we come!