Breaking in the Bug!

To break Ed's new engine in, I drove him to St. George and back for the annual Mini Indy trip for my work. This year a buddy of mine that's a pilot for Skywest went with me to help out on the tech team. Here is the beginning of the road trip. There is something cool about driving a 45 year old car across the state of Utah!

 Vance lives in Stansbury Park so I picked him up and we drove the back roads on the west side of I-15 to get to St. George. We took a detour and hit Eureka to see Porter Rockwell's cabin that was moved there from his property. Here it is. It was cool to see and it is amazing how they were built back then. Eureka is a cool old mining town. I had never been there so I enjoyed checking it out.

 While we were looking at the cabin, a guy across the street kept looking at us. He yelled at us and asked if we wanted to see the inside of the cabin. We of course said yes and so He said he had to get the keys and to look at the car he had inside this old building while he went to get them.

This is what we saw inside the building. It's a 1928 Studebaker. It was in great shape for it's age and he told us all about the car and the town. He actually owned a bunch of buildings along main street. He had mentioned that he owned the topless bar down the road and we both rolled our eyes. The funny thing was that as we drove out of town we saw his topless bar. It was an actual bar that had no roof on it. Ha Ha, it was then that we laughed like crazy.

 This was a huge pulley that was once used to lift miners in and out of the mines. I can't remember the name of it but it was huge and very cool.

 We stopped at Delta and hit this Mexican restaurant. I had cheese enchiladas and they were great. I always hit this restaurant on my way to St. George.

We made it to St. George and had fun fixing go karts for a few days. While we were down there we had some time to hit a ghost town that was just outside of Leed's Utah. It is called Silver Reef and was an old silver mine back in the day.

Here is some of the old buildings. These ones were rebuilt.

 The views were spectacular. The weather was just as good down there also.

 More photos from Silver Reef.

Here are some of the old remnants from the silver mine.

 Up on the side of the hill is the remains of a foundation from the mill.

 More old remains from the buildings.

If you look closely at the hill in the background you can see part of an old uranium mine. We drove Ed up that hill and almost got stuck. It was a dirt road and at one point I thought we would need to lift the front of the car to get it unstuck. I guess a lowered bug isn't the best car to go 4 wheeling in.

 You can see the dirt line on the bottom of the front fender in this picture. Ha Ha, we didn't get stuck though.

 We came across an old protestant cemetery. There were some old headstones dating back to the early 1800's.

 Looking back at Ed from the cemetery.

 Found some old cool buildings in Leeds also.

We headed home on Saturday. We decided to take highway 89. That is a lot more scenic then the route we took down. We crossed over to it at Cedar City on route 14. I have tried to take this road the last couple years but it has always been closed. It was finally open this year so that's the way we went. It is quite a climb at some spots and we saw a lot of snow along the way but Ed drove great. Here is a wall of ice we saw along the way.

 Climbing higher!

 This is the summit and the view was awesome!

 You can see for miles.

I saw this cool RV on the road home. I had to stop and get a picture. I think if I had it I would get rid of the RV part and make it a car hauler. I love the old Cab Over trucks.

 I didn't have a picture of Ed in Panguitch so I stopped for a one.

 We had all sorts of weather. It was windy, sunny, and we saw rain turn to sleet at one point along the drive.

All in all, it was a great trip. Ed ran like a top without so much as a hiccup. That made all the work beforehand worth it. When all was said and done, we traveled 716 miles, burned 22 gallons of gas, a 1/2 a quart of oil (which was at the beginning of the trip,after the rings seated it didn't lose any) and we averaged 32.4 miles to the gallon. It looks like we can look forward to driving many more miles this summer and enjoying every minute of it!