The Route 66 part of the Route 63 Warp Drive tour is in the rear view mirror but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some serious highlights left.
There’s a massive ditch left to see plus some places where the legendary John Wayne rode into Hollywood legend.
Jerry Sutherland
The Grand Canyon is massive and it’s a major destination point for anyone gets to northern Arizona. The road there from Flagstaff is typical of Arizona—you climb to 7000 feet and the road opens up into high desert country.
It’s also typical because the road to it is iffy, so the old Belvedere took another thumping along with major winds but again—this is a mission.
You climb up to get to the Grand Canyon and then you hit the tree line. The guy at the gate to the park looked like a peer, age wise—and he probably was because he didn’t take a wild swing at the guess-what-the-car-is game. He picked it off as a Belvedere and he guessed 318 instead of Slant Six—a lot of guys up north in Alberta guess leaning tower of power 6 for some reason.
I’ve seen the Grand Canyon from a plane, but that view doesn’t do it justice because it’s so massive it takes up the whole landscape. I’m not a big fan of heights but the canyon view is so big it was worth it.
The old Plymouth was a big draw for people from all over the world because Grand Canyon is an international tourist magnet. There was also another example of American hospitality when Jim was checking fluids under the hood and a young guy immediately asked if he wanted a boost. That hospitality has been a trademark of this road trip.
The next stop was Monument Valley, Utah. This place was Duke Wayne’s backyard for a ton of Westerns—including ‘The Searchers’, ‘Fort Apache’ and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’. Other people may remember Monument Valley for many other movies like ‘Vacation’ and ‘Forrest Gump’, but in my world comparing Chevy Chase and Tom Hanks to the Duke is like comparing a grizzly bear to a Chihuahua.
Monument Valley was one of those things where what you think it would be like might not mesh with what it’s really like. That wasn’t the case.
This is a must-see shrine for every John Wayne fan on the planet. It’s one of those places where you feel like you’ve been there before thanks to Hollywood déjà vu. It was magnificent.
It sounds like a cliché, but this mecca of Hollywood Western movies had everything—red dust storms and tumbleweeds. Utah really brought their A—game.
The Plymouth got a day off from hard labor on this part of the Route 63 odyssey because it went through a torture run on the freeway and the climb to Oatman. It paid off with a 4-mile-per-gallon jump.
It’s a partner on this trip—you gotta take care of it.
Jerry Sutherland
By: Jerry Sutherland
Jerry Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer with a primary focus on the collector car hobby. His work has been published in many outlets and publications, including the National Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Regina Leader-Post, Vancouver Sun and The Truth About Cars. He is also a regular contributor to Auto Roundup Publications.
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