There and back again: A Lemons Tale
Some of my favorite things in life are travel, adventure, and good times with friends. Lemons affords me many opportunities to explore all three, sometimes in ways that surprise me. As I shared in my last post about caging our 280zx, we had a problem: our windshield was broken.
Tricky things, windshields. Being glass, they break. Being breakable, they are tough or expensive to ship, often both. Being windshields for 40+ year old cars, they are rare. So we have a hard to find, hard to transport, expensive item for Lemons. An alternative is a Lexan windshield. While these solve some of the problems, they create new ones. Several opinions have been shared with us that Lexan somewhat distorts the view, and is easily scratched. Running at night as we do, visual clarity is very important, so we decided to find an actual windshield for this car.
Dan, our cage builder, located a junkyard in Salt Lake City that had one for $65. I found one online, in Los Angeles, for $600. The former would not offer to ship to us, the latter would for $700. The math here starts to make our decision clear.
We are going to drive 1000 miles, over the mountains, in the winter, to acquire a replacement windshield for this stupid hobby.
Something we really love about Lemons, is the community. While this is nominally a competitive sport, most of the participants acknowledge we aren’t really competing against each other so much as we’re competing against our own cars, and the MTBF calculation. As such, teams help each other out. More than that, people in Lemons tend to be good people, so they help each other out. Our friends Salty Thunder Racing are local to SLC, and were kind enough to grab this junkyard glass for us and hold it until we could get out there.
With the supply problem solved, we now had a transport problem. Denver to Salt Lake is a 16 hour round trip in the best conditions. In places, the road is terribly potholed and rutted. Glass is notoriously fragile. We decided to load up with everything imaginable to wrap, stabilize, cushion, secure and ensure if we made it back, we made it back with a usable windshield.
Leaving Friday afternoon, we planned to get as far as we safely could that night. Sadly, we hit weather and traffic almost immediately.
Traffic was slow and slippery for about 100 miles, but the road cleared after Glenwood Springs and we made pretty good time before calling it a night in Green River, Utah. After some sleep, we were up and out by 6:45 Saturday morning. Snowy and slow along US-6, but we made it to Salt Lake without event and acquired, padded, and secured the windshield.
The ride home was long. Our road remained mostly clear and routine until Vail. That’s where we hit a magical combination familiar to any Colorado drivers: ski weekend traffic, snow and ice, and the run up to the Eisenhower Tunnel. Doubling down on that, it’s the Aspen X Games weekend. So, in short, we started to go very, very slow. Emerging from the east end of the tunnel, we then entered a fogbank. Mountain weather is weird.
Final tally for our journey
Most importantly, we and our new glass, arrived home safely. As Type 2 fun goes, this trip delivered. The smarter choice would have been to ship the glass to us. Let someone else assume all the risk of transport. But this is a story about camaraderie, and problem solving, and making some real questionable decisions. Need something that’s 1000 miles away? What else could we do? We’re an endurance racing team!
