Читать книгу Oregon, the Picturesque. A Book of Rambles in the Oregon Country and in the Wilds of Northern California онлайн

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With a heavy car one should start out with a new set of tires all around and a couple of spares, also new. Tires for medium and small cars can be found at most of the country garages, but few of them stock the larger sizes. On such a tour one can not afford to take unnecessary chances with tires—it would be exceedingly inconvenient to experience a “blow-out” on a narrow, thirty per cent grade. Some of the runs will keep one busy enough without fooling away time on tires—if it can be helped. So new tires and the best will be economy in the long run. One must be prepared to see them suffer severely from the sharp stones that strew the roads in many places—but we found it possible to make the three-thousand-mile round without a puncture, though our casings were sadly cut and scarred at the end and some of them had apparently reached the limit of their usefulness.

In the recesses of some of these giant hills a serious breakdown is a calamity, indeed. It is impossible to tow the car to a repair shop and it must be abandoned until necessary parts are obtained and repairs completed by the roadside where the accident occurred. We saw quite a number of these abandoned machines and wondered what luck the owners had in getting assistance. In some cases it would have been a serious matter to undertake to walk to the nearest house. In one instance we had the pleasure of giving an unfortunate a lift just as he was starting on a seventeen-mile trudge with a broken axle rod over his shoulder. Another very serious feature of many of these breakdowns was the time it must have required to get the new parts—all of which reflections served to make us doubly thankful for the complete immunity which our sturdy car enjoyed. Undoubtedly, the safest car for such a tour is the heavy, powerful, and practically unbreakable car of the type we used, or the light, agile Ford, for which a full line of parts can be found in even the smaller towns of the remote districts. We did not meet many cars on the greater part of our trip, but of these, fully nine-tenths were Fords. In many cases they carried a complete camping outfit, making the occupants independent of hotels and daily schedules.