by Doug DeMuro
Attempting to drive around water to reach dry salt could cause you to get stuck in the mud.
The salt crust often forms pressure ridges as much as 8-10 inches high. Beware of the damage these could cause to your vehicle, especially when driving fast.
Distances and visual perception can be very deceiving, especially on hot days, when a strong mirage takes effect. Many objects will disappear below the horizon as you get farther out on the salt.
Becoming disoriented, lost, and/or getting stuck are very possible.
Always take lots of water, extra food, and additional clothing.
Do not rely on a cell phone to get you out of trouble.
But who reads documents like these in their entirety? Nobody, that’s who. Everyone knows the standard way to read a travel advisory is to read the first couple of sentences for any especially grave concerns, then scan the rest of the thing for the phrase “angry eyeball-slicing serpent,” and if that isn’t in there, then you’re probably good.
And so, this is how we found ourselves taking Exit 4 off of Interstate 80, which contains one Sinclair gas station, the Bonneville Salt Flats access road, and a diner (located inside the gas station) called the “Salt Flats Café,” where no meal—including the “steak and shrimp”—costs more than $8.95. We were wearing shorts, we had no idea what we were doing, and we were surrounded by giant storm clouds in virtually every direction.
The next twenty minutes were the most fun we had on the entire 6,400-mile trip.
In case you’re like me and you’ve always wondered exactly how the Bonneville Salt Flats are set up—but you have no desire to visit rural western Utah for fear of losing the will to live—I’ll be detailed in my description of exactly how it is.
The way it starts is, you get off the highway, and you get on the Salt Flats access road, which runs for about a mile north of the highway, or possibly three miles, until you reach the end. Honestly, it could be six miles. I don’t really remember.
At the end of the access road, they have this sign that basically tells you where you are (“The Bonneville Salt Flats”), and gives the history of the area (“The aliens could be back at any minute”), and says that you should be careful, because at least a couple people die every few years when they become disoriented, lose sight of the access road, and wander around for a while before succumbing to a disturbing death that probably has the same salt content as a Super-Sized McDonald’s value meal.
But it didn’t deter us. In fact, as I recall, the very first thing we did upon reaching the sign was a) slowly guide our car off the end of the access road, which has a slight drop before giving way to the salt, and b) push the accelerator to the floor while cackling madly.
Actually, I was pretty disappointed for the first mile or two on the salt because it was surprisingly rough. While there was nothing around to hit and no one nearby to stop us from doing whatever we wanted, there were these tiny windswept mounds of salt located every few feet that made the whole experience feel like we were driving on a choppy lake in a boat with a Cadillac steering wheel. I barely reached 100 miles per hour before realizing that you could probably go faster a few miles south on straight, smooth Interstate 80 than you could ever go on the flats.
And that’s when we found the trails.
As it turned out, we had unknowingly arrived only a few days after the conclusion of Bonneville Speed Week. The downside was that we had just missed the enormous gathering of crazy people from all over the world who had assembled in western Utah to see how fast they could drive ridiculous vehicles they had spent several months creating in their garage with their buddy Dale from four houses down.
But there was an upside: apparently, during Speed Week, the organizers get together and smooth out all the choppy ridges to create a few glass-smooth, dead-straight “trails” that stretch for miles into the distance so drivers can test their top speeds—like a salt-covered drag strip. And since we arrived so soon after Speed Week, the trails were still smooth, still obvious, and—in some cases—even still marked. When we discovered them, we realized that if we stuck to a trail, we could go for miles into the salt without ever reaching any sort of imperfection.
So that’s exactly what we did.
I spent half an hour driving as fast as I wanted, going wherever I wanted, with an increasing level of confidence on each run. At first, I hit 80, then 100, then 120. We stopped to take pictures: of us, of the car, of us and the car, laughing and smiling, storm clouds still brewing in the background. We climbed back in and I hit 140, then 155. There wasn’t a thing stopping us from doing whatever we wanted. We could’ve been skinning koalas out there and they never would’ve known.
That’s because we were completely alone out on the flats. When we first showed up, that wasn’t true: a few Cadillac engineers were testing the ELR before it went on sale. (As we later discovered, they shouldn’t have been testing how fast it could go, but rather how long it could sit unused at a dealership.) But they appeared to be packing up just as we arrived.
A few minutes later, we found out why.
With my girlfriend in the car trying her hand at driving 100 miles per hour over a food seasoning, the rain started.
Looking back, we should’ve assumed the rain was coming. If you examine our photos from that day, you can see it: rain clouds in every direction, looming over us, like a modern parent whose son is exploring a playground. (“Oh, Stephanie, that’s so tru– BRADEN OH MY GOD PUT THAT DOWN!!! PUT THAT DOWN!! PUT. THAT. DOWN. I DON’T CARE IF IT’S A TOY. ONE OF THE OTHER CHILDREN MIGHT HAVE EBOLA!!!!”)
And so, as my girlfriend decelerated after her 100-mph run, the rain started falling. And not just falling. Really pouring.
So what happens when there’s a huge rainstorm on the salt flats? I was really worried because we were pretty far out there, and I had no idea what to expect. Was wet salt like dirt, where it immediately became muddy and impassible? Or was it like concrete, and we could drive right over the top of it? I tried hard to think back to my high school chemistry class, really hard, to remember anything about this topic, and I finally came up with the answer: they did not teach us this in high school chemistry.
So we decided the very first thing we should do was get the hell off the salt as quickly as possible.
So quickly, in fact, that we didn’t even have time to change drivers. I told my girlfriend to head for the big, scary sign at the entrance, the sign we should’ve listened to, and don’t slow down.
So she drove towards the sign, as quickly as possible, as the rain poured, until finally we reached the access road. Apparently taking my “don’t slow down” message to heart, she plowed over the dip to get back on the road, scraping the bottom of the bumper in the process. While this would normally cause any car enthusiast to wince, or cry out, or immediately throw the door open and run to the front of the car to inspect the bottom of the bumper for damage, I didn’t care at all. We were off the salt. We were back on the road. We were going to LIVE!!!!
The car, however, was a different story. Even though we spent only forty minutes on the salt, the underside was caked in the stuff, as if we had driven around for an entire Chicago winter without washing the car—and then, just as spring was poking through, we crashed into a pretzel truck. When we made it back to the closest town to the flats—West Wendover, Nevada—the first thing we did was search for a gas station car wash to clean everything off. Unfortunately, we didn’t find one, largely because the most technologically advanced thing in West Wendover is the Phillips screwdriver.
(NOTE: My apologies to the residents of West Wendover. I have recently become aware that you also have Scotch tape.)
The next day, as we continued our trip east into the Salt Lake City area and Colorado, we passed the flats while we drove along Interstate 80. This time they were completely covered with standing water.
Although we didn’t get to spend hours on the flats, our trip was nevertheless a success: We got to experience them. We got to t
ake the car up to 155 miles per hour. And they didn’t have to amend the scary sign at the end of the road to include a picture of those idiot tourists in the floating Cadillac SaltWagon.
Driving in Foreign Countries
Hello and welcome to a couple of stories about driving in foreign countries. I covered a few of these in my last book, wherein I told you what it was like to drive in Italy, and possibly also in France. I don’t really remember because the last book was published three years ago, and in the time since I have done enough drugs to wipe out an entire Midwestern suburb.
I’m just joking, kids! Uncle Doug doesn’t do drugs! Uncle Doug’s drug is speed, and by speed he means getting his money back on used car warranties.
Anyway, I’m now going to tell you what it’s like to drive in a couple of other foreign countries. I am doing this as a public service: after I tell you all about driving in these places, you can avoid doing it yourself. Then you can take your family to other places for vacation, better places, such as the Doug DeMuro Boyhood Home, which is located in Denver, Colorado, and includes several Doug DeMuro boyhood artifacts and also my mother, in the front yard, watering plants.
Istanbul, Turkey
My girlfriend and I spent about a week in Istanbul, Turkey, in March 2014, and I drove precisely once: in a Fiat 500L, to go from our hotel, near the Galata Tower in the center of the European side of the city, to a giant park on the Asian side. For those of you who don’t know, Istanbul is where Asia begins, so part of the city is in Asia and part of the city is in Europe, sort of like how part of Korea is technologically advanced, and modern, and developed, and in the other part, people eat sawdust to stay alive.
Anyway, back to the park. I still do not know the name of this park, but it’s right on the water, and if you look at it on satellite view, it appears to have some attraction that looks like giant elephant from the sky. I don’t know about you, but when I see a park with an enormous sky elephant, I rent a Fiat 500L and go visit it.
Actually, what happens is I rent a Fiat 500L and I sit in traffic attempting to go visit it. And this is one of the main things I can teach you about Istanbul: it is huge. Even though Americans primarily know Istanbul as a city visited by twenty-somethings who go to Coachella and believe that corporations are evil—so evil that they may break into our homes and stab us in the eyes during the dead of night—it’s actually a huge, diverse, gigantic place with a metropolitan area about the same size as Los Angeles.
Except there is one difference: Istanbul drivers are insane.
Now, I know that if you’re reading this from Los Angeles, you’re laughing at that statement, because you know that Los Angeles drivers are also insane, and what the hell does DeMuro know about insane California drivers? Well, let me answer your question with a question: In Los Angeles, do you have people selling Snickers bars on the highways in heavy traffic? Do you have people selling melons?
I am dead serious about this. There are only a few big bridges that go from one side of Istanbul to the other, and during rush hour they are totally swarmed with people driving old Fiats who live in the suburbs but work in the city center. So I was sitting on the bridge approach, which is a six-lane road that has on-ramps and high speed limits, sort of like a highway, and the thing was just totally gridlocked. And then this guy walked up selling melons.
This got me thinking: What the hell do people do once they purchase these melons? Are there people who are sitting in traffic with a knife and fork, just ready to start slicing up a cantaloupe? As I was sitting there pondering that fact, another one hit me: this is an insane, ridiculous society, full of insane, ridiculous people, and to be completely honest a cantaloupe sounds pretty good right about now.
But I didn’t buy one. I personally did not have a knife and fork. I also didn’t buy anything from the guy selling Snickers, which turned out to be a huge mistake. I figured I would wait until a little later, when I was a little hungrier, but after that there weren’t any other guys selling Snickers. Some guy had Almond Joy, but let’s be honest: that’s like wanting an iPhone and instead purchasing a clock radio.
So there are people walking all around the highways in Istanbul, selling stuff. You’d think this is the strangest thing about driving there. It is not.
By far the strangest thing about driving in Istanbul is that there are bus stops on the highways. I am totally serious about this. We’d be cruising along at sixty miles per hour, and all of a sudden there would be a mass panic to get over from the right lane because a bus just stopped up ahead at a designated bus stop that exists right there on what would be considered, in America, to be a major interstate.
Now, this shouldn’t be that big of a problem because the bus stops are on the shoulder, but here’s the thing: People drive on the shoulder. Cars drive on the shoulder. Vans drive on the shoulder. At some point during my quest to visit the Park With the Elephant Thing, I adopted a “when in Rome” attitude and I started driving on the shoulder. Me! Someone who is obsessed with lane discipline and highly aware of all the road rules and regulations, cruising along on the shoulder of a highway in Istanbul in a Serbian-built hatchback, swerving to avoid the bus stops.
Speaking of those bus stops: although I did not personally experience this, I can only assume that it must be a lovely feeling to wait for your bus roughly fourteen inches away from cars driving sixty miles per hour on a major urban highway.
One last tidbit about driving in Istanbul: the taxicabs do not have seat belts. I am not saying that a few of the cabs have seat belts, or half the cabs have seat belts, or some of the cabs have seat belts. I am saying that I rode in ten different taxicabs and not a single one was equipped with any sort of restraint device in case we were involved in a serious collision with some major traffic hazard, such as a guy selling bird feeders.
This wouldn’t have really been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that every single taxi in Istanbul was a 1990s Fiat sedan, which had been repainted yellow in a manner that showed that the operator’s primary interest, when it came to his vehicle, was whether or not services could be carried out for the price of a hot dog. Naturally, I did what every American probably does when they visit Istanbul: I held the little coat-hanger handle mounted above the back window. I hoped for the best. And I as I stared out at the people waiting for the bus on the side of the highway, I silently reminded myself: it could be worse.
Seoul, South Korea
As disorganized and chaotic as it was to drive in Istanbul, it was the exact opposite to drive in Seoul. My clearest memory of the week I spent in South Korea is this one: I was walking around in a university district where I was the only non-Korean person for blocks. It was the kind of place where you were so surprised when you saw a white person, that, as you passed each other, he stared at you, and you stared at him, and both of you were thinking: Should we high-five?
So anyway, I’m in this university district, and I’m walking around, and I get to a major road. It’s a road that goes between the university and this really busy residential and commercial area next to the university, and the “DO NOT WALK” sign is illuminated.
And I’m standing there with dozens of Korean people, maybe hundreds of Korean people, on either side of the street, waiting to cross from the university to the residential and commercial area.
And I look left. And I look right. And there aren’t any cars coming.
And not one person is crossing.
We are all standing there, next to an empty street, and the other side is maybe four lanes away, and nobody is coming, and not a single person is willing to risk walking out into the street. I contrasted this to New York City, where this crosswalk would be mobbed with dozens of people, all eager to get somewhere, until a taxi came through and literally started bumping into human ankles.
Nonetheless, I re-adopted my “when in Rome” attitude and decided not to be the sole crazy person who crosses, just in case I was committing some major cultural faux pas and would be arrested by the Kore
an Ministry of Rule Following and sentenced to one year of making sure elementary school children didn’t run with scissors. Eventually, the “WALK” sign came on, and we all crossed, and this experience sort of summed up my time in South Korea.
Driving there was similar. The main areas of Seoul are comprised of enormous, wide roads—some had as many as twelve lanes—with intricate intersection traffic-light timing that separates turning traffic, pedestrian traffic, and vehicle traffic so that nobody is ever competing with anyone else for the same space. The roads are well maintained. Nobody runs red lights. It’s illegal to turn right on red. Of course it’s illegal to turn right on red.
The other thing you notice, when you’re driving in Korea, is the fact that every car is silver, white, gray, or black. Initially I thought I was only noticing the monochrome cars, or maybe I was seeing a lot of chauffeur-driven cars, but then I did a Google search and discovered that the Wall Street Journal actually covered this phenomenon a few years ago, and I wasn’t seeing things: virtually every car in Korea really is silver, white, gray, or black.