It’s tax season at BangShift Mid-West. That means that in-between writing stories, jamming on an engine that I’m praying to everything will fire and not kick the rods in the first half-hour, and spring cleaning the house I’m busy with a folder filled to the absolute maximum with receipts from the last year. It’s all in there…gasoline, hotels, food, car repairs. It’s all part of the fun. So is totaling up the yearly mileage claim. For the last couple of years, the figure has floated around 15,000 work miles on my Chrysler. That hasn’t counted in the Mustang, and it sure didn’t count the Imperial. 15,000 work miles seems like a year of hell on a car to me. But 7,700 miles in one vacation trip that lasted just under a month was a glorious time, a chance to roam two-thirds of the continental United States, a chance to see the vast expanses of the American Southwest, Bonneville, the plains of the central part of the country, the mountain roads that lead into Seattle…it was a dream. What was the difference? How much fun I had while I was driving. That trip from 2009 was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done…top ten, period.

Now, the trip that Alex Roy and Zach Bowman took back in 2015 was somewhere around 2,900 miles, which is less overall mileage, but was done in under 42 hours…which beats my 24 days roaming handily. My trip was in a 2006 Monte Carlo SS and the only thing I really had to worry about was hard launches turning the 4T65-E transaxle into a fine powder. They drove a Morgan 3-Wheeler, a 115-horsepower two-seat oddity powered by a V-twin up front and a single tire out back. If you want a basic vehicle, the Morgan is about as basic as you get: no top, no windshield, radiating heat from the exhaust at best, a ride height that will give you a great view of passing vehicles’ wheels, and just enough room for you and a buddy to get closer than you never wanted to be for the trip. Roy has been associated with the Cannonball Run route for years, and this trip is no different, just reversed: he ends up at Redball Garage at the end and starts in California. Between those two points is a lot of worry, a lot of cold, and a lot of miles in what’s basically a gas-powered wheelbarrow.