Gosswein says SEMA’s role is helping provide the “education” legislators need when it comes to auto-related bills.

1. making sure no vehicles older than 25 years would be in jeopardy of being crushed;
2. encouraging recycling rather than destruction, of vehicles and their components;
3. convincing legislators that while the cash-for-clunkers may get as many as 600,000 older vehicles replaced by newer and more efficient vehicles, there are tens of millions of other older vehicles that could be repaired and retrofitted, cleaned up to provide much better fuel and emissions efficiency, were there some fiscal incentives for their non-auto enthusiast owners.

There’s something wonderfully therapeutic about a road trip, especially when much of the driving is done on two-lane roads, with no deadlines to meet along the way, not even hotel reservations rushing you down the road, nothing but you and your car and, in my case on this trip, the radio because I forgot to bring along my own music, though I did find myself so inspired by one piece of pavement and the surrounding scenery that I was making music in my mind, and writing lyrics that fit the tune.

The occasion for this trip was what is becoming an annual drive from Phoenix to the Midwest, this time to cover events such as the Orphan, Bloomington Gold Corvette and Survivor cars shows, this time also by way of Little Rock, Arkansas, where Lexus was introducing its new IS C coupe/convertible and HS hybrid to automotive writers from Arizona, Colorado, Texas and other states in the region.

I left Phoenix early on a Tuesday morning and didn’t have to be in Little Rock until dinner time Thursday, so there was time to enjoy the drive, to make some stops along the way, and still cover some 600 miles each day between sunrise and sunset.

Too many people are in too much of a rush. They simply find the closest Interstate, set the cruise control, crank up the CDs or iPod or satellite radio, and tune out everything else.

But to do that would have meant not driving the road that winds through Arizona’s Salt River Canyon (see photo), which has the misfortune of being located in the same state as that grandest of canyons. Were it located almost anywhere else, the Salt River Canyon would be a major tourist attraction attracting the awe it deserves.

Soon after climbing out of the canyon I punched the “seek” button on the radio and discovered KTNN, 660 on the AM dial, and for probably the next two hours I listened to the Navajo language station created in 1985 when it was granted the country’s last 50,000-watt signal.

I didn’t understand what was being said, but the language being spoken was beautiful, and while most of the music was your typical Nashville or Linda Ronstadt pop, occasionally the station would play a hauntingly beautiful song sung in the Navajo nation’s own language.

I lost the signal somewhere west of the Plains of San Agustin, a haunting sight made even more eerie by the presence of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s VLA – the Very Large Array – a series of huge satellite dishes (see photo) mounted on railroad tracks so they can be arranged to better listen to whatever radio signals might be coming our way from another solar system.

While the VLA seeks to learn if we are truly alone in the universe, driving two-lanes across New Mexico can leave you wondering if you might be alone on this planet. There was so little traffic I started keeping track; the average sighting was one other vehicle every 7.5 miles.

I spent the night in Clovis, just west of the Texas border, and before leaving town I drove to Norman Petty’s recording studio (see photo) where Charles Hardin Holley of Lubbock, Roy Orbison of Vernon, Texas, and so many others made their first records. 

I didn’t hear any Buddy Holly or Roy Orbison songs on the radio as I crossed the Texas Panhandle, but I did listen to a station that was “All Ag, All Day.” Hereford, Texas, claims to be the Beef Capital of America, yet the big news on the all-agriculture radio station was the World Pork Expo scheduled for the following weekend in Iowa. 

I did follow Interstate 40 from Amarillo to Oklahoma City. The Interstate supplanted Route 66, which provided me the opportunity to see the best sign of the entire trip -- the sign for the Roots 66 sod farm in Elk City, Oklahoma.

I did drive a section of the Mother Road (see photo) on my way to the Rock Café, of which I’ve already written.

From Stroud, where the Rock has been rebuilt, I headed south and east, picking up Oklahoma’s narrow, winding state Route 1 just west of McAlester, where I spent the night and ate at a café where the vegetable of the day was hominy, which I found just as distasteful – actually as tasteless – as when my mother tried to make my brother and me eat it when we were kids.

Some 50 miles east of McAlester, Route 1 climbs into the Ouachita Mountains and becomes the Winding Stair national scenic byway, the only scenic byway in the state of Oklahoma. It is scenic, and an out-of-the-way byway that rides along the ridge and provides vistas that are green in the spring but, I’m told, burst into spectacular colors when the leaves turn in the fall.

The Winding Stair climbs and descends for more than 50 miles (see photo) and extends several miles into Arkansas, though the road and scenic vista parking areas are much better on the OK side of the state line. However, the stairs with an almost constant double-yellow lane marking, must be miserable when clogged with summer or fall tourists in motor homes. Nonetheless, on a spring weekday they provided a traffic-free driver’s paradise, nearly as empty as that road back in western New Mexico.

My GPS suggested that to cover the most distance in the least time, I take Interstates (30 to 40 to 55 to 57 to 80 or 294 or whatever leads to 355) all the way from Little Rock to just west of Chicago. I tried, and enjoyed seeing crop-dusting pilots flying oh-so-close to the ground and by crossing the Mississippi near the place where it accepts the Ohio, and with the rivers meandering and merging to the point that on the GPS screen they look like a blue version of those roads back in the Salt River Canyon (see photo).

But I could deal with even such scenery only so long. I needed to reconnect, not just to buzz by.

So, with the GPS repeatedly urging me to “make a U turn” and return to the route, I instead found a two-lane that took me up through Illinois farmland, through towns such as Gibson City, Forrest, Dwight and Morris, and past countless high school graduation parties with people sitting at tables set up in people’s yards, before there was no option but to turn into the Chicagoland metropolitan maze where it seems that every road is under construction and the talk on the radio is how many minutes it takes commuters to get from here to there. -- Larry Edsall

Mine was a Rambler Rebel. My orphan, that is.

My first car had been a used and, as it turned out, abused Ford Fairlane, which in the early 1960s had gone from the base full-size model in the Ford lineup to a mid-sized (though at the time they called it “intermediate”) platform. I was working my way through college as a part-time sports reporter for the local newspaper. I needed a way to get back and forth from campus to work weekends and bought the car for $800 from some guy who worked with my dad at the state prison. The Fairlane, a white, four-door sedan, expired not long after I bought it and I always felt I’d been ripped off by someone who should have been behind bars instead of watching those who were.

Discouraged by my experience with buying a used/abused car, I vowed to replace it with a new car that would come with a factory warranty. But which car?

Actually, it wasn’t a difficult choice. It was 1967 and what I wanted was a Pontiac GTO. Or at least a Le Mans, the car Pontiac had souped up to become the GTO. But as a sophomore in college I couldn’t afford the GTO, and when I looked it over, I really didn’t like the untweaked Le Mans.

A few months earlier, my Grandmother had bought a Rambler Ambassador, a big, four-door sedan. Grandma was sort of the little old lady from Pasadena, except that we lived in the Midwest, not near the southern California coast.

But she could double-clutch and power shift with the best of them. I’ll never forget the day I was driving the 1957 Ford, a red-and-white Fairlane sedan with a V8 and three-speed manual that she had owned but sold to my parents, and I power-slid around a corner and instead of threatening to tell my parents she asked if I could teach her the technique. That’s how cool my Grandmother was!

Grandma eagerly served as the designated driver for what the men in our family referred to as the “old bitties,” you know, those blue-haired widows who played card games and ate tiny sandwiches and rolled bandages and sent packages to missionaries. To better provide such service, Grandma had traded her car for an AMC Rambler Ambassador, a big, and at the time fancy four-door sedan.

She had had a really good experience with the local AMC dealer, so after being disappointed in the Le Mans, I went to her dealer and ended up buying my Rebel, but not the SST fastback or even the trimmed-out 770 but the base 550, a four-door sedan, white with, I think, an aqua-colored interior – and a 5-year/50,000-mile warranty.

I have three primary memories of the car: Not that I ever used them for their intended purpose, but the front seats fully reclined; the car’s aerodynamic design was so bad that at around 75 miles per hour – at the time the legal limit on Midwestern Interstates – the front end would lift and the steering would go numb; and one morning when I was on my way to class a woman pulled out from a side street and we collided and I refused to allow either of our cars to move out of the intersection until the police arrived and heard our stories and she got the ticket, which she fought in court and how she was taken from the courtroom after being found guilty and yelling at the judge.

Come graduation time, I traded the Rebel on a 1969 Ford Mustang, V8 fastback.

Since then, I’ve owned an Audi, a Volkswagen wagon (remember the Dasher?), two vans – full-sized GMC and Dodge minivan -- a Subaru Justy and a Ford Tempo my children drove back and forth to high school, and for the last decade, a Nissan Frontier pickup truck.

But until Dodge is enfolded into Fiat, that accounts for only one orphan, which brings me to this weekend’s 13^th annual Orphan Car Show in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where I’ll be one of the judges.

Hmmm, I wonder if anyone will show up with a Rambler Rebel?

-- Larry Edsall

STROUD, Oklahoma

In the movie Cars, Sally Carrera, the sky-blue Porsche, leaves her life as a big city lawyer and moves to Radiator Springs, a town so bypassed by the Interstate that it hadn’t seen a new car until Sally rolled into town. But she didn’t roll on through. She fell in love with the community, which she helped rebuild.

That’s the art. It was inspired by real life, a cross-country road trip taken by Pixar studios founder and Cars director John Lassiter and his family, and then repeated by Lassiter and his crew from the studio. That second trip focused on old Route 66 and research for the animated movie.

While traveling the Mother Road, Lassiter and company came upon Stroud, just east of Oklahoma City, its historic Rock Café and the café’s owner, Dawn Welch, whose story inspired the Sally Carrera character.

Dawn Welsh had grown up in small town Oklahoma, and vowed never to return once she left and saw what was over the horizon. She traveled well beyond that horizon, working as a purser on cruise ships before settling down, which to her meant buying a restaurant in Costa Rica. First, however, she had to return to Oklahoma to sell a small piece of land her grandmother had left her.

But instead of buying a restaurant in Costa Rica, Dawn Welch bought the Rock Cafe in Stroud.

“We met people out on Route 66 who, at first, we’re thinking, ‘What are you doing here? You’ve traveled the world. You’re educated. You speak three languages. But you run a restaurant out in the middle of nowhere.”

That from Jonas Rivera, production manager for Cars. He continued:

“But then, after an hour of having dinner with this person, you think: ‘Wow, this is perfect. I’m so glad you’re here because you’re keeping it alive’.”

I’d interviewed Lassiter (through his public relations staff) and Rivera and Dawn Welch (by telephone) in 2006, a few weeks before the movie opened, for a magazine story I was doing. I enjoyed the movie, have a soundtrack CD that makes for great road trip music, and made a mental note that if I ever got close to Stroud, I’d stop by the Rock Café.

Well, I’m on my way from Phoenix to Chicago by way of Little Rock, Arkansas, and since it was only about 40 miles out of my way, I decided to pay Sally, I mean Dawn, a visit.

When I arrived, I noted scaffolding up against one side of the building. Dawn was outside talking on the telephone and the only cars in the parking lot were those of construction workers. Actually, as it turns out, they are reconstruction workers.

I introduced myself when Dawn finished with her call and asked about the construction. I thought that perhaps she was expanding. What I didn’t know was that a little more than a year ago, the Rock Café caught fire one night and basically burned to the ground.

But Dawn didn’t take it as a sign it was time to buy that restaurant in Costa Rica. Stroud and the Rock Café had become her home. As she put it, “like Sally” she and her children started cleaning up the mess, carefully placing fallen stones so the restaurant could be rebuilt just as it had been, which each stone back in its original place.

Originally, the Rock Café was built from stones excavated when the road was paved in 1939.

Dawn wanted the building precisely reconstruction so it could maintain its place on the National Register of Historic Places. She discovered that buildings burned to the ground usually don’t keep such designation after being rebuilt, so she was particularly careful. She hired David Burke Historic Preservation of Perry, Oklahoma, to oversee the reconstruction, which was done with such careful detailing that one of the interior boards that wasn’t burned was used to create a pattern so a millwork could recreate the exact paneling. Inspectors from the National Park Service already have visited and assured her that the café’s historic designation will be preserved.

The work is nearly finished. Dawn plans to reopen the Rock Café on Friday, or at least over the weekend.

Sally Carrera would be so proud.