(Get your kicks on) Route 66

Celebrating fifty years behind the wheel - and I've loved every minute of it.

I’m in the middle of my 66th year. That being so, I’ve achieved a personal milestone: fifty-plus years behind the wheel. I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen, in June 1972. Since then, I’ve logged millions of miles in cars, trucks, and motorcycles all over North America. It’s been quite a ride. I would not trade my history of wonderful road trips for anything.

When I was a teen, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, getting a driver’s license was a significant rite of passage. It occupied much of nearly every teen’s attention during their sophomore year in high school. Nothing, and I mean nothing, felt better than the day you finally took that first drive by yourself as a fully licensed driver.

My first car was a beater, a marine green 1965 4-door Chevy Impala with an automatic transmission. There was absolutely nothing cool about this car except for the fact that it ran and got me everywhere that I wanted to go. It was a hand-me-down from my father. I took an entire year of shop as a freshman in high school to learn the skills needed to get it running and keep it running. But the make, model, and condition of the car were largely irrelevant. It was my ticket to freedom.

I still remember very clearly everything about my first drive as a licensed driver. I drove by myself from our house in Winchester, KY, to Ft. Boonesborough, which is about a half-hour away. It was summer, and all of the windows were down. It was freedom incarnate. It was a truly life-altering experience. Everyone should feel that good at least once in their life. Everyone.

That Chevy took me all over the southeastern U.S. until my freshman year at the University of Kentucky, when it became prohibitively expensive to maintain as a broke and struggling university student. For most of 1975 and 1976, I lived on or near campus and rode a bicycle everywhere. For a time, I did a round-trip commute of 60 miles daily on my bicycle. I was certainly fit, but transportationally challenged.

In the summer of 1976, I acquired, specifically for the purpose of making my first road trip west, my second car, a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle. I spent three weeks camping beside my car all over the Rocky Mountains. I did my first major climbs in the West, solo, on this trip. Unfortunately, the engine in the VW gave out coming over Monarch Pass on the way home. I coasted to Poncha Springs, Colorado, where I spent a week getting the car fixed.

That winter I drove this same beater car hundreds of miles to a very pretty UK cheerleader’s house in Owensboro, Kentucky, for a Christmas Eve visit. I parked a block away. Later, as I was driving back home early Christmas morning, I pulled over on the shoulder of Interstate 64 in southern Indiana for a nap, overlooking the lights of Louisville, Kentucky. I can still see that vista in my memory as clearly as that morning.

My next car, which I acquired in 1978, was a 1972 Triumph TR6. Rolled fenders, a ragtop, and British Racing Green I loved this car as much as I have ever loved any inanimate object. But just like a supermodel girlfriend, the Triumph was a high-maintenance challenge.

Due to the fact that British Leyland never figured out crankcase ventilation, a case of motor oil went with me on every road trip. But it was nonetheless a joy. I actually drove the TR6 to Colorado in winter 1978 for a mountaineering trip, with the roof down much of the way. Apart from this and a Gumball Rally-style trip to Mexico and back, however, I think my most vivid memory of this car involves rebuilding its engine in the bitterly cold and snowy parking lot of my apartment complex in the darkness of winter 1979.

Next came a 1970 Datsun pickup truck with a camper shell, in which I crisscrossed the country many times (interspersed with more apartment parking lot repair jobs, including a clutch replacement).

This truck ended up being replaced with my first brand-new vehicle, a 1984 Toyota SR5 4WD pickup. This was the truck to have back in the day. I put almost a quarter of a million miles on it, traveling from climbing area to climbing area and ski resort to ski resort all over the country. I sold the two climbing books that I wrote, which eventually paid for college, out of the back of the Toyota as I traveled.

This truck migrated with me when I finally settled out west in 1992, where I sold it for about 50% of what I paid for it new. About a decade ago, I saw this distinctive truck, now 30 years old, going down the road in eastern Idaho. It was a 110-octane jolt of nostalgia.

Next was a brand new Ford F-250 with a 460-cubic-inch gas V8. I ended up driving it for nearly 20 years. This truck pulled a bunch of trailers all over the west during my pro-audio days. I slept in it many nights in the parking lot of the Eccles Center in Park City when I was the engineer for the house during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

As good as the F-250 was for my needs in the 90s, it wasn’t up to pulling around the toy hauler trailers that we began to acquire in the 2010s. That’s when we acquired a 2002 Ford F-350, a real beast!

Nothing telegraphs “toxic masculinity” quite like a 7.3-liter Powerstroke dually. I ❤️ toxic masculinity.

But man does not live off of diesel trucks alone. Our family cars during this time were a 2006 Honda Element and a 2013 Ford Flex. Both were interesting and unique vehicles. The Flex, in particular, was a much-underappreciated automobile. I was sad to see it go. The Element, not so much. There’s not much of a market, outside of cultists, for a mid-sized SUV with worse fuel economy than a full-sized truck.

In 2017, we bought a brand-new F-350 dually. This purchase was my wife’s idea. She wanted more room and a nicer back seat for our growing family on long road trips. “Babies gotta have room.” One day, she asked me to go with her "just to look" at a friend's dealership. Before I could even yell for help, the dealer was programming the door codes to her specifications. I’m almost certainly the only man in America who was ever arm-twisted into buying a large, powerful, DRW diesel truck by his spouse.

“Say, who wears the pants around here, H.I.?”

In 2009, I acquired my first Mustang, a 2004 40th anniversary GT ragtop. My first sporting car since the TR6. In 2017, a friend of mine who owned a local dealership made me an offer that I could not refuse, and the 2004 GT became a 2017 Shelby GT-350.

The GT-350 is an interesting car. First, it’s simply wonderful to drive. The electronics allow you to set it up quite capably for anything from a day at the racetrack to a cross-country road trip.

Secondly, as my wife, Megan, puts it, the Shelby has the ability to affect the behavior of other drivers when it’s sitting still at an intersection. There’s no such thing as a casual trip to the grocery store in the Shelby, as every kid in an import tuner and every wannabe NASCAR driver in a beat-up pickup truck would rather die than let you get away from a traffic light first. The hot-rod guys spit on the ground when they see the kids’ car seats in the back.

Just recently, we became a two-Mustang family with a 2022 Mach-E. Anyone who gripes about putting a Mustang badge on the Mach E clearly hasn’t driven one. It would smoke my SN 95.

Finally, we recently bought the truck of my dreams, a 2022 F-350. It’s a road-trip magic carpet. That completes the stable at Chez Hackworth.

But there’s another entire branch to this tale. In the late 1990s, I discovered motorcycles. My first bike was a 1977 Honda 550 4K. A 1992 Yamaha TDM850, a 1999 Honda Super Blackbird, a 2002 Honda CBR954 Fireblade, a 2005 Ducati S2R100 Monster, and a 2016 KTM SDR 1290 followed.

All of these were mixed in with a whole slew of dirt bikes, which I’ve had the opportunity to ride to some incredible places. Adventures galore.

Around 1999, I discovered motorcycle road racing and raced a 1990 Yamaha FZR400 RR for many years as a member of the Willow Springs Motorcycle Club. It was all great fun, but I’m walking around with a titanium hip because of my obsession with $15 road racing trophies.

Nonetheless, I still love the smell of race gas. It reminds me of my craziest moment while road racing at Willow Springs. Turn 9 at Willow is widely renowned as one of the scariest places on the planet. It’s a fast, decreasing-radius turn that’s mildly off camber, has a kink in the pavement at its apex, and the sun is shining right into your face shield in the afternoon.

One afternoon during a race, I was coming around Turn 9 with the sun in my eyes, flat out, knee on the deck, when I saw a large, fast-moving shadow in front of me. I think that I might have actually peed in my leather race suit. I looked up and saw a F-86, from nearby Edwards Air Force Base flying low over the track, upside down; the pilot was waving at me through his canopy.

I drove a 1995 Ford Escort GT back and forth from California to Idaho - with a trailer and my race bike - for five years.

I guess that you could fairly say that I have had a long, interesting love affair with vehicles.

I’m pretty sure that I’m a member of one of the last generations who’ll enjoy such an affinity with personal transportation. My 20-something son has no interest in cars or motorcycles, and neither do any of his friends. I bought my son a Jeep when he turned 16, which now sits in our driveway, mocking me. Road trips have been replaced, for younger folks, with chat rooms and video games. The ability to work on cars, something that virtually every boy of my generation had, is now so uncommon that good automobile mechanics command six-figure salaries (good for them, too).

That’s just the way the world is going. Slowing it down is like urinating up a rope. A Gen Z-er once told me that a video game simulation of the corkscrew at Laguna Seca was, in all actuality, just as good as experiencing the real thing.

It just ain’t so, kid—not by a long shot.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth