In which Sid and Doris rouse the Jolly Green Giant from his New Jersey slumbers and make a gentle start on their second American road trip, heading for Easton and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania.
Sid and Doris are on the move again, taking the Jolly Green Giant to share in the delights of Doris’s [number redacted – D]th birthday celebrations by going to New Orleans to listen to some toe-tapping’ Dixieland Jazz. Birthdays are not moveable feasts, and so this trip has to take place in August. Not the most favoured time of year to go to the Deep South, as it combines hot sultry humid weather with the start of the hurricane season, but the Ford Country Squire came with a Climatatur air conditioning system, all the rage in the late ’50s, so comfort is (almost) assured.
The map of the journey will gradually take shape here:
While we have been away the JGG has been living in fancy company in New Jersey. Dave North collects us from Newark in a twin turbo, 600 bhp V8 Mercedes and when we get into Matt’s HQ Stephan has a better-than-new Lamborghini Miura up on the ramp. $2m? hmmm….
Mr Giant himself has new ball joints in his front suspension so the steering is much lighter. He has a new-new radiator, and new gaskets in his Holley carb so he makes much more power. He seems to have a better gear change although as the three on the tree ignores first gear when in D2, and we only have three in total, he effectively has a two speed gearbox. Thank heavens for torque.
So we thank Stephan, take a picture with Dave and set off for ‘not very far’ as Sid and Doris were up at 6am UK time, have had an eight hour flight, have sorted through what spares/tools to take and are commencing to feel a little weary. Once around the block with Dave for refamilarisation and your doughty duo are off.
The Climatatur (the shiny unit along the bottom of the dashboard) has been regassed and as the air temperature is in the low 90s Fahrenheit and mid 30s Centigrade we give it a try. The compressor takes power, which means burning more fuel and makes its own heat under the bonnet. The water temperature rises over 200F, the petrol gauge visibly lurches to the left and we switch off the air con and roll down the windows. You can only have air con when you don’t really need it.
Otherwise all seems well and soon Sid has peripheral vision again, trundling down local roads.
The theme music for this trip may be The Long Promised Road – on the Beachboys’ 1971 album Surf’s Up and also the title of a 2021 documentary about Brian Wilson who wrote and produced so much of their music. Not all Beach Boys songs are about cars and girls; some of them are about surfing and many of the rest are about Brian. We have Frank’s little boogie box (the radio is not a runner) and once we get a little more fluent in the car we plan to have some driving tunes, though sorry to miss out on WJRH and the like.
Our first night is in Easton, a town that grew up because the Delaware and Lehigh rivers (pronounced as in yee-har) merged here. Canals and later railways were built to take locally mined coal to New York and then to the steel works at Bethlehem. It has the look of a town that was built until 1929 and then left until about 1990. They celebrate Easton’s contribution to the civil war with a monument while a shop front comments on more recent loss of life.
Other things we might have liked to have seen in both New Jersey and here are shut. American museums are generally open Wednesday to Sunday. We arrived on Monday. Doh.
Tuesday morning we go to the canal museum on the basis the canal will still be there even when the museum is shut. It is, and so are two mules and a new, surprisingly tall, coal barge that they tow along the canal when it is loaded up with tourists. Tourists weigh less than coal, report the mules. We do not miss much at the museum as one of the volunteers is there on his day off. He shows us many phone videos of mules and barges, also of other old cars he has seen.
Next stop is Bethlehem and the USA’s largest free-to-visit music festival (always an -est, and we believe that it is subsidised by beer sales). Our B&B is the Sayre Mansion – they owned the local railroad and we can hear the deep whistle as trains rumble through town. For S and D the lure is not the music but the historic old town (with more colonial era buildings than Williamsburg, so there) and most importantly the huge Bethlehem Steel Works (1857 to 2003) seen here from Zest’s dinner balcony… and open tomorrow. Yee-har.