La Cañada couple chronicles their adventures on Route 66 from aboard a new Corvette
Longtime La Cañada Flintridge resident Michael Bell and his wife Melea traveled to the factory to pick up their car and returned via the legendary Route 66 for 2,600 miles. He blogged about their road trip online.
La Cañada resident Mike Bell was gassing up a rental car in Branson, Mo., two years ago with wife Melea when he noticed a couple at the station in a brand-new silver-gray Corvette convertible. Impressed by the vehicle, he struck up a conversation.
The man explained to Bell he and his wife had just purchased the new ride, fresh off the line from the GM assembly plant in Bowling Green, Ky., and delivered it to the National Corvette Museum for pickup. They’d decided to turn the 2,100-mile return home into a cross-country road-trip vacation.
“They were all smiles and were on their way to Santa Barbara,” Bell recalled. “That just sealed the deal.”
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Bell took one look at his wife and told her he’d just thought of a trip they could take in the next couple of years. Melea Bell recalled turning to the man’s wife for more details on the soundness of their decision.
“I looked at the lady, and you know what her comment was? Pack light!” she said with a chuckle.
That chance encounter came full circle on Friday, when the Bells pulled into the driveway of their La Cañada home in their own brand-new Long Beach Red 2016 Corvette Z06, purchased directly from the factory and road-tested on a two-week, 2,600-mile trip through eight states on Route 66.
Longtime La Cañada Flintridge resident Michael Bell and his wife Melea traveled to the factory to pick up their car and returned via the legendary Route 66 for 2,600 miles. He blogged about their road trip online.
Highlights of the couple’s venture through middle America were captured online in a blog written by Mike Bell and maintained through the travel website gayot.com. There, the longtime insurance broker and car enthusiast offers cheerful notes on Americana culture, cuisine and characters encountered along what John Steinbeck termed “The Mother Road.”
Of course the 650 horsepower automobile, and people’s reactions to it, figures heavily into Mike Bell’s writings. In one post, he recounts being pulled over in Claremore, Okla., by a state trooper. Although obligated to stop the Vette for not having license plates, the officer confessed to the Bells his ulterior motive.
“His father and his grandfather owned Corvettes, so I think he really just wanted to talk cars,” Mike Bell said, adding that the trooper even suggested creative traffic stop photos for the blog.
The appeal of a Corvette cutting its teeth on America’s vast open roads is nothing new. Bell himself admits part of what made the gas station couple’s story so intriguing goes way back, all the way to the popular ‘60s TV show “Route 66,” in which a man down on his luck travels the country in a 1962 Corvette convertible with a friend looking for what adventure may come.
“That’s where the Corvette and Route 66 became tied,” Mike Bell said of the show. “Ever since then, everybody’s been doing Route 66 in Corvettes.”
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Logging about 250 miles a day on their trip, and making sure to stop at the best tourist traps Route 66 has to offer, the Bells hit a number of tiny towns that flourished once the multi-state highway started bringing in road weary travelers in the late 1920s.
In Gallup, N.M., they lodged at the historic El Rancho Hotel, where glitzy Hollywood stars of old used to catch up on sleep in between film takes on outdoor desert sets. They watched burly men chow down in a 72-ounce “Big Texan” steak-eating challenge in Amarillo, Texas, and posed for photos at the city’s Cadillac Ranch, a public art installation that resembles Stonhenge in size and scope, but with spray-paintable Cadillacs for stones.
The Bells saw Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park and witnessed the badlands beauty of the nearby Painted Desert while working their way through the outpost towns of Seligman, Holbrook and Oatman, a defunct gold mining town known for its wild burros.
“We really got to see a lot of America, and a lot of Americana,” Melea Bell said, recalling the seemingly endless stream of patriotic songs, people dressed in their red, white and bluest and the ubiquity of country gravy. “I think the patriotism throughout the Midwest is fantastic. I also think it was nice to complete our travels — there’s nothing like coming home.”
As for Mike Bell, driving a car home from the dealership was never so fun.
“This was definitely the trip of a lifetime for us,” he said.
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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com
Twitter: @SaraCardine
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