HONEYMOON

[JerryHofschneider]

Aftermatth--The Time After Matthew.

Every part of the long Atlantic coast, from south of Miami to north of New York, and any part that was touched by Matthew's recent furies, I have driven upon it.
Many of the trips were straight shots up I-95, but three of the rides from Florida to New York were on roads where the goal was to stay as close to the Atlantic as possible, all the way up the coast to the Big City..
The first trip was on was my honeymoon. My bride Sue and I took an early Spring drive from Palm Beach to Manhattan on seaside roads like Florida's A1A and the Grand Strand, trying to keep water always in sight on our right.

Our car--brand new-- was a 1974 Datsun 610. It was the wedding gift we gave each other. ( I wrote about the Datsun in a Skidmarks essay--" What's a Datsun 610?" ).
It was a cozy 4-seater, a Sun Yellow, 4 speed, rear drive air conditioned coupe--2 litres, 100 HP, independent suspension--a slightly heavier version of Datsun's neat, competitive 510 coupe, it even had an FM radio as standard !!. It was almost a sports car.
(...It also had a plasti-chromed trunk nameplate wrapped in oily factory paper in the glove box that said "Bluebird U", in Datsun-speak, like it commemorated a Japanese avian school and they sort of forgot to attach it to the car... A gift from the factory? ...I still have it.).

The wife and I hugged the Atlantic coast, driving out of our way to get through some of the the Sea Islands, staying in Savannah for a quick consummation, then on to Folly Beach and Myrtle Beach and Georgetown and the natural magic of the Cape Hatteras seashore drive . Here is where you start getting on and off of ferryboats.
All the vistas we saw from the windows of the little yellow Datsun were damaged by the hurricane.
They usually get hit from time to time, but Matthew took them all out at once.
Almost all of the towns damaged or flooded that the news people mention are places we passed through, or we stopped to get our feet wet and do some beach time, or we had stayed a few hours for lunch.

We crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/ Tunnel around 11PM in a light storm, and closed the link between Virginia Beach and the Delmarva Peninsula.
If you are ever in the East and are even near the Norfolk/Va Beach area, find this bridge. It's a 20-mile highway over some of the busiest shipping lanes in North America. It's a long, low causeway that skirts the waves for miles and occasionally soars into the sky on a great suspension bridge or plunges beneath the shipping lanes into two long, deep tunnels.
There is nothing but Africa to the East, hiding out there in the darkness, and there are always big ships, both military and commercial that float past, slowly moving across a huge expanse of water, their running lights flashing like red stars low on the horizon.

I opened the Datsun up and had a great time doing the crossing. Halfway over, my wife took the wheel and she got us back on dry land. Then, three miles from the bridge's northern terminus, the Datsun died.
It just quit, like that, and we coasted to a stop on a really dark and traffic-free highway, in Virginia tobacco farm country in a misty rain, at midnight.
Nothing we did could make the car start.
I saw the problem immediately. The coil wire was being blown upward by the under-car wind and was rubbing along the air cleaner, wearing off the insulation. It finally shorted out after our race across the causeway, stranding us.
It was the simplest of parts on a car that was not complicated in the least. Much later, the 610, at 85,000 miles finally overheated and the head gasket blew. We pushed it into the garage and bought another car. Years later I would rebuild the engine and repaint the car and use it for another 40,000 miles, but that was after our divorce.

We sat silently for awhile, stuck in the darkness in a place where neither of us had ever been before.
It began raining harder. We resigned ourselves to our fate.
We had two bottles of champaign that we were saving for NY, so we decided to drink them, since there was absolutely nothing else to do...well, that led to the second consummation, this time in a dark and humid Jap car that still had that new car smell.
That's something that we fondly remembered for as long as our marriage lasted. ( I din't mean the new car smell).
We eventually pushed the bucket seats back and took to sleeping as the wine went to our heads.

--Dawn, and she's poking me.

"Wake up. You've got to see this."

I opened my hung over eyes one at a time and saw that the sky had some distant light, a wispy sea fog clung to the roadway and we were surrounded by about 30 people, migrants, fieldhands, who were waiting for their work bus to pick them up. They were having a lot of fun looking in on us as we slept. The Datsun had died right at their country crossroads bus stop.

The only thing to do was greet them, which we both did, then asked them where the nearest phone was ( lots of laughter there)-- or where a repair shop or an auto parts place was. (More laughs). Unless we went back and crossed the bridge, there wasn't ANYTHING around us for the next 20 miles, we were told.

One of the guys had a brother who ran a shop 30 miles away, so he and I went down a muddy dirt road and through a dark, deep woods to a church, woke the pastor and used their phone to call his brother and explain the problem.
He said he would come down with a part as soon as he had coffee.
When we got back to the highway, the work bus had gone and the only thing on the foggy roadside was Sue, sitting on the hood, in dire need of aspirin, enjoying her honeymoon as much as she could.

About a half hour later, an ancient pickup came hustling down the road. The brother had a Datsun coil, NOT an easy thing to find in rural Virginia in 1974. We attached it and the car fired up, never to fail us again. He wanted $10--for the part and for the gas to get here. I gave him $20 and I gave the guy who missed his bus a ride to his jobsite. He managed to scam ten off of me, his "finder's fee". I was happy to pay it.

We drove straight on to New York, skipping the shore drive and clipping through Jersey to the Staten Island Ferry. My wife;s first nighttime view of NYC was from over water. The Ferry carried cars back then, something that changed after 9/11. That is a huge loss. The Staten Island Ferry WAS one of the World's Great Boat Rides.
( It still is... it doesn't carry cars anymore, but it IS free).

We did a few more consummations in New York then drove back to Florida via the Blue Ridge. It was a hell of a trip, one of my personal Top Five and the best honeymoon she ever had.

Sue and I divorced after 20 years, and the next time I did that particular trip was in 2005 in the 350Z.
I was alone, no wife or champaign to distract me.
I hugged the coast, revisiting all the little beach towns and tried to find the migrant's crossroad after I got off the open water of Chesapeake bay, But had no luck.

All the crossroads around there look the same for 20 miles down the road.
Besides, it was a long time ago.

[Bubba1]

Interesting coincidence. My sister owned a '74 Datsun 610 coupe, 4 speed. She bought it used in the late 70's. I had driven it many times. It was a decent car overall. It never gave her a problem despite it feeling cheap. Hers did not have a/c, and the vinyl seats seemed to sweat in hot weather resulting in a strange film that would form on the inside of the windows, but it always started. I remember it having a peppy feeling to it, but that feeling faded as soon as you accelerated from traffic light next to pretty much anything besides an old air cooled Beetle or Schwinn. It was not a fast car. Though it cruised nicely when you eventually got up to speed...

[JerryHofschneider]

I remember the film on the windshield. I always thought it must have come off the black vinyl dash top.
It could have been the ( black) seats, too, because they would always feel damp and greasy on hot days and would not wick away any moisture. i remember wondering if the seat covers were melting.
I used to keep a cotton beach towel in the car to use when the seats were hot, and a black stain would always appear on the fabric. I was never sure if it was a dye or a plastic compound coming off the seats.

Also, if you got in the car on a sweaty day it felt like you were sitting in a very shallow hot tub That's why I carried the towel.
You could wipe the window film away with Windex, but it would be back in a week.

It seemed to appear when it was really hot and damp. I lived in far South Florida, where hot is an everyday item and excessive humidity is the law.
In Florida, if the sun is shining, it's hot, so I was very familiar with the filmy windows...

[szh]

Cool story! I have done mildly similar drives down (three times), although not close to the coast and not as adventurous as yours.

As well as a few almost cross-country trips ... once in my Z (MS to CA) and another time in my 1991 Q45 from San Jose to Mobile, AL to attend a friends wedding (that had some interesting speeding stories).

The first trip up and down the East Coast:

Back in 1985, I was living in NH and my sister was studying at Mt Holyoke in MA. My other sister and Mom visited from overseas that summer, and we decided that we had to see Epcot Center and Disney World in Florida.

Since my car was a Nissan 300SZ Turbo two seater, I had been renting a sedan every weekend, to visit my sisters and Mom when they were in MA, from this local car rental place in Salem, NH.

For the Florida trip, I needed more space and rented a wagon (a Pontiac 6000 STE, as I vaguely recall) from them and the four of us headed south. The wagon easily held all our luggage for a long trip and it was a relatively comfortable drive down. Mostly on 95 though 'cause I wanted to maximize the time in Florida. We stopped one night at a hotel in Raleigh NC and arrived the third day in Orlando.

We spent two or three days at Disney World, a couple more at Epcot, and one day at Sea World. The last was a bit of a disappointment after the first two - we should have done it first, so would not have been as underwhelmed perhaps.

At the end of the week, we headed back North. Stopped in Raleigh overnight again - same hotel - and then visited friends in Princeton, NJ, stayed overnight and went on to see family in Buffalo, NY.

My cousin who lived in Buffalo said we had to go to Montreal, check out places like the CN Tower (scary glass floor at the top - I did not step out on it!) and see the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, etc. So on we trekked there. I had not brought my passport with me, but in those days, a US driving license was quite sufficient to cross the border into Canada and back - rest of my family had their ID's and passports along.

After one more day in Buffalo, it was back to MA. I dropped my family at the house my sister had rented there over the summer, and I drove on to NH.

We did this over just about two and half weeks. When I brought the rental back to the place I usually rented from (was renting from them just about every weekend that summer), they were surprised (peeved?) that I had put over 3000 miles on that relatively new car ... all miles free!

Of course, the next few time I rented a car from them, they charged me some cents per mile for the rest of the summer. Fortunately, the summer was over soon enough and I did not need too many more weekend rentals driving back and forth from Salem NH to South Hadley MA.

Z