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Our three-man team drove from Connecticut to California in 31 hours and 24 minutes, beating Alex Roy's average speed and becoming the fastest minivan in cross-country history.
Imagine hurtling across the country in the world's fastest minivan… Wait, wait! Where are you going? This is going to be good! Mildly amusing at the very least, I promise.
Anyway. Imagine blazing from the right coast to the left in a silver Honda Odyssey with a guy who drives people’s guts to hospitals for a living. Along for the ride is guts-guy’s teenage son. What could go wrong?
These days it seems everyone has a story about some Cannonball-related thing they've done. I've got a few of my own. Naturally, none of these tales are mine alone, as it takes a decent-sized group of morons people to pull these things off in a way that isn't completely pointless.
Let's see. There was the time I "won" a New York-to-San Francisco "race" in a car that didn't look like it could make it from Queens to Manhattan, and had actually failed that mission on a number of occasions. And the time two friends and I found ourselves driving through a blizzard at night at 12,000 feet above sea level in an even worse car, right after we had visited one of Colorado's then-new good-times dispensers.
But my favorite trip was also, not coincidentally, the fastest I'd been on, and it was undertaken in a used Honda Odyssey, of all things.
It was the spring of 2019, and April 1st was to be the 40th anniversary of the 1979 Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash—the one that goofy Burt Reynolds movie is based on. A bunch of Cannonball nerds had agreed to meet for dinner at a nondescript restaurant in Darien, Connecticut, the departure point for Brock Yates and his cronies on their final illegal adventure. Just two weeks before the anniversary dinner, I got a call from a guy those nerds call Yumi (pronounced "yummy").
"Wanna do an anniversary run?" he asked in a voice that sounded like the South Carolina low country's answer to Matthew McConaughey. "I got a van with a 30-gallon fuel cell out back. We'll be stylin'. Anyway, no pressure."
Yumi has a lot of irons in the fire, but one of his main gigs is driving kidneys, eyes, and other body parts between healthcare facilities in the Southeast. The dude loves to drive. He's the kind of guy who will hop in the car, drive for almost an entire day, visit for a few hours, then excuse himself to drive home, explaining to his flabbergasted would-be host, "it's a beeeeautiful night for a drive." When someone asked him how he felt after setting one of his solo cross-country records, he started jabbering about how great the drive was: no traffic, clear blue skies, hours and hours behind the wheel. Yumi's paradise.
He also keeps his exploits close to the vest. It's not that he doesn't like to share his stories, or how fast he's driven. It's that he doesn't need to. He's not worried about who knows and who doesn't. As far as I've ever been able to tell, the joy of doing it is all he needs. That and a few hours of beers and bullshitting at the finish line.
So when he asked me if I wanted to accompany him and his son, then a high school senior, I didn't hesitate to say yes. Aside from the fact that they would just show up at my house outside New York City with a car that was already prepared (it can be a lot of work to prep a car correctly for a cross-country trip at speed), I knew they would be great company.
A dozen or so people showed up for Sunday dinner in Darien. After they had all wished us luck and gone their separate ways, we hung out in the parking lot of the Goodwives shopping center, the very place the '79 Cannonball had kicked off, and prepared for our departure. Yumi checked the wires and tubes coming from a giant plywood box mounted to a trailer hitch tray behind the van. The rickety box, which looked like it should be full of landscaping equipment or used body parts, housed a translucent 30-gallon boat tank full of gasoline. It weighed down the back end a little bit, but didn't seem to affect handling much. Yumi also showed us how to use the latrine he had set up for us: a clear plastic tube with a funnel at one end, stuck through a hole he'd drilled in the floor behind the last row of seats. A bungee cord held a can of wet wipes, and there was a windshield washer bottle full of water to "flush" the tube after use. Ingenious. The car’s doors were adorned with large magnetic red-crossed logos declaring us "medical couriers." Well, Yumi actually is a medical courier, so why not?
It was eerily quiet when we left just before 8 PM. We didn't hit much traffic on the way out, or really at all until morning. And we never exceeded 119 miles per hour—partly because that’s where the van bumped up against its limiter, but mostly because the gas mileage above 105 or so was horrendous. But believe it or not, the van hummed along at high double- and low triple-digit speeds for hours with nary a shudder. Once in a while an aroma something like burning oil wafted through the cabin, but nothing was on fire and all the gauges looked normal, so our skipper—the guy who owned the van—ignored it.
At one point we got stuck behind a slow-moving patrol vehicle, prompting some of the guys watching our progress on Glimpse, the GPS location-sharing app, to ask why we had slowed down. This went on for miles. I won't say who, but one of the more famous (infamous?) Cannonballers in the group nonchalantly suggested we call in a report of a dog loose in the eastbound lanes. I picked up the phone. My finger hovered over the dial pad, ready to call the state police dispatcher. But I never got up the nerve to lead our state trooper on a fraudulent wild dog chase.
Fortunately we didn't see too many cops at all, although one did think enough of us to stop and say hello. It was 1 AM and we were in the middle of the country somewhere when the radar detector began shrieking. The driver (don't worry, it wasn't the high-school senior) laid on the brakes as soon as he heard the detector. We all saw the police cruiser coming in the opposite direction and our hearts sank as it made the inevitable flip at the turnaround just behind us. Eventually, he caught up with us. State patrol. Businesslike, but not irate.
"I got you going 104," he said matter-of-factly.
"You sure that was us?" Yumi said, eyes wide with incredulity. "I coulda swore I saw a silver car go streakin' on past us just back there."
A cloud of smoke from the van's overstressed front brakes wafted across the trooper's expressionless face.
"Yeah, no." he said flatly. "But I'll drop the ticket down to 94 so you don't have to come back for court."
As the trip wore on, we chatted about everything from art, music and politics to muscle cars and cheap beer. Yumi waxed often and poetic about the beauty of the scenery as it unfolded before us, exclaiming, "God, what an amazing country," as we slid into the particularly stunning bottom half of Utah.
By that point in the trip, we had come up with a novel way to use the ol' pee bong out back. There was always someone driving, someone navigating and looking for speed traps, and someone sleeping. So when the sleeper awoke, he would go into the back and whip out the funnel, watching with amusement as the cars behind wipered the piss-mist from their windshields. The driver would wait for a more-or-less empty straightaway, move the power seat all the way back, and set the cruise for 80 or so (much safer that way). The navigator would lean over and grab the wheel. Then the driver and the now-awake sleeper could switch places, because there's room to do all that in a minivan. Whoever's turn it was to sleep could put on an eyeshade and settle into a plush leather-trimmed captain's chair for a nice little snooze.
Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm a father, and my views on a lot of things have shifted considerably since my pre-children days, but who says minivans aren't cool?
By the time we reached California, our drive-sleep-piss choreography, the 30 gallons of extra fuel, and the constant hammering on the van's high-mileage 3.5-liter V-6 had resulted in what was looking like it might be a pretty solid time. As we closed in on Los Angeles I got a text from Ed Bolian, who had set a record in 2013 that stood for six years. He was egging us on. Something to the effect of how amazing it would be if we beat Alex Roy's time in a minivan.
Alex Roy had, in 2007, resurrected the Cannonball from near-death when he broke a 25-year-old cross-country record. Roy drove from the east side of Manhattan to the Santa Monica pier in 31 hours and four minutes in a tech-stuffed 2000 BMW M5 he had spent a lot of money preparing. In the end, we were off his time by exactly 20 minutes, having driven nearly 60 miles further between Darien, Connecticut and the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach. But we did manage to best Roy's average pace by about one mile per hour—in a minivan that Yumi had bought from a used car broker as his family transport for $12,000. As for tech, Yumi had installed a radar detector, an LED light bar, the piss tube, and the secondhand boat tank.
With a final time 0f 31 hours, 24 minutes, Yumi's unmodified minivan recorded what was then the seventh-fastest cross-country time, behind a string of expensive, often hopped-up German sport sedans and one C7 Corvette. And he even drove the damned thing home, after cooling his heels in California for only a day or two. Our standing slipped quite a bit over the next year, particularly after Arne Toman and Doug Tabbutt set their first record later that year, and during the early days of the pandemic, when plenty of people (not me) took advantage of traffic-free highways to set records previously thought impossible.
But even after all of that, Yumi's well-used Odyssey is still the fastest van in the land. You'd be forgiven for not caring, but from the perspective of a couple of middle-aged schlubs and a guy who's now in college, it was pretty cool. Besides, who the hell Cannonballs a minivan? In any case, our trip bore little resemblance to the nearly 50-car shitshow that was the '79 Cannonball, though the 2019 C2C Express certainly did. Our run had more in common with Brock Yates' initial foray into his Cannonball adventures in the spring of 1971. As Yates, his then-teenage son, and a couple of his friends had when they broke a cross-country record that had stood since the 1930s, Yumi, his son and I simply climbed into a van, pointed it west, and buried the pedal. There wasn't much more to it than that, and there never will be.