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+Before it explodes you can smell it coming. A whiff of tk slips in through the draft at the top of the doghouse. 
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+That's when I start looking for a place to pull over. Not that I need one really. I haven't seen another car in four hours of driving. Most of the population of Nevada lives in Las Vegas, and we are not in Las Vegas anymore.
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+We are on highway 168 somewhere between a ghost town and the top of the White Mountains. 
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+I stop right in the middle of the road. I mean why not? 
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+No one speaks. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, listen to the hiss of the radiator boiling over. Then my wife turns around and says to kids, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" Of course they do. They barely notice when we breakdown. They probably like it, change to get out stretch their legs, explore the desert. This is part of why we live this way, to do impromptu things like exploring the desert.
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+I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seem to want one. Ours is electric blue with a wide white stripe wrapped around it. 
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+It's hard to embrace van life as a family of five, and most vans are, well, they're vans. I'll never get Chris Farley's in a van down by the river out of my head. I can't live in a van. And RVs are for retirees. I'm not retired. I don't want to be retired. Let's get a trailer then, my wife said two years ago when we decided to try living on the road. So I searched for a trailer, but Google, bless its algorithmic heart, which that day had a bit of arrhythmia, showed me a Travco instead. "That", I said. "That is what we need". Two months later we had one. A year later it was actually liveable. My kids dubbed it "the big blue bus," or just the bus for short.
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+The view under the doghouse is benign. The engine is fine. The Dodge 318 LA series motor is one of the most indestructible engines ever made. I few mountains in Nevada aren't going to kill it, it just needs to rest every now and then. Catch it's breath. The world of 1969 didn't have always-on technology. You took breaks. You rested.
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+The radiator has already stopped overflowing. In half an hour it'll be cool enough that I can open it and top it off with some water to maybe get us the rest of the way over the mountain. I head outside to see what the kids are up to. 
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+It's late September in the high foothills of the white mountains. There's not much around. Tufts of creosote dot a moonscape of rock. There's a cluster of cottonwoods at the bottom of a dry arroyo just down the slope from us. It's the only shade we've seen in a day of driving. My wife and kids head down to play in the shade. 
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+get out to survey the scene. 
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+This isn't the first time we've overheated, it won't be the last. If you want to resurrect and live in a piece of 1960's Americana like the Dodge Travco, you have to be okay with overheating. You have to be okay with stepping back in time to an era when travel was more open ended. 
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+A thin thread of a smell, like bacon frying downstairs when you were a kid and it was too cold to get up until that bacon was ready. You know it's coming though, old RV engines overheat climbing mountains. It is what it is. 
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+We're bound for California and all we've got are paper maps. Which is good because there hasn't been phone service for days. 
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+More description of the Nevada desert. The kids go off to play. Corrinne looks for pottery and fossils, rocks.
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+Something about Henry Miller driving into LA. 
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+"optional sewage incinerator system, the “Destroilet,” a gas incinerator-type toilet that almost eliminated the need to empty holding tanks. There were problems to be sure: the 318-cubic-inch engine in the early models had to work very hard to go up any significant incline; there were stability issues because of the lack of anti-sway bars, and its low-slung body hampered tire changing"
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+Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I assumed it meant no passing lane. 
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