The Adventures of Andrew Maurer

We first thought we’d try to make it back to Vancouver from Kingman, but replace the oil every 50 miles or so. We drove the 60 miles to Needles, CA and then got cold feet and decided to call it quits. We went to a McDonalds, got some ice cream, used the free wifi, and decided that we’d head back to Kingman and take the Greyhound from there. Though we made sure to check out a liquor store and attempt to buy a bottle of wine for the night. We feigned ignorance (Canadians) when they noted that we weren’t 21.

We slept the night outside the mechanics shop again. Our last night in the car! We also found a dramatically better way of setting up the bed in the car. It gave us another 2 feet or so of legroom. We had a wonderful sleep indeed!

Woke up, had our last breakfast with the car. We had the camp table and chairs set up in the shade offered by a U-haul truck (I don’t quite know why, but I don’t think they believe in public shade in this city. Someone should really get on that.) We had our last coffee with the Bialetti and discarded the rest. (It would have been a pain if we tried to take the tin back and have coffee spill all through our bags.) We embarked on the very difficult challenge of fitting all of our belongings including fragile souvenirs in the 4 bag limit. With very efficient packing, we managed to fit everything except 6 canisters of stove fuel, the mattress, and the 2 camping chairs. Quite the feat!

We were going to sell the car for $50 to the mechanic. But we decided to spend our spare hours looking for a higher bid. We were offered $100 by the man at the scrapyard. Though just before making the sale, one of the scrapyard’s patrons offered us $125. Sold! We drove over to the Greyhound stop, handed him the insurance and registration papers and he handed us $125.

4 busses later and nearly 2000 miles later brought us from Kingman, AZ to Las Vegas, NV; Las Vegas to Salt Lake City, UT; Salt Lake City to Butte, MO; Butte to Seattle, WA; Seattle to Vancouver, BC. Home at last! Nothing broken but two scraped knees.