Road fever : a high-speed travelogue
Page 35
Everything we wore needed to be burned. We probably did not look like good security risks. The guards regarded us with some suspicion until we asked them to, please, sign our logbook.
"Hey," one of the men asked, "are you the guys trying to set that record'^"
We admitted that we were
"There's a guy from Popular Mechanics looking for you," the man said. "He flew in yesterday with a photographer. There's a film crew here, too."
"Could you, uh, please sign the logbook?" Garry asked. "Please put the time and date in there. The, uh, the clock is still running."
The guards conferred among themselves and decided that it was precisely 10:13 on the night of October 22. All four signed our logbook.
And the clock stopped.
Factoring in the five-hour time change from our starting point in Ushuaia, it had taken us twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes to drive from the tip of South America to the edge of the frozen Beaufort Sea in Alaska.
Garry caught my eye. "Another victory," we said in ragged tandem, "for man and machine against time and the elements."
The men in the blue jackets seemed to be amused by our condition.
"So," one of the guards said, "you guys think you got this record?"
We said that we did.
"Where did you start?"
"Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America."
"How many countries did you go through?"
"Thirteen," I said.
"How many miles?"
We hadn't figured it out, but it was somewhere near fifteen thousand.
"And how long," one of the guards asked, "did all that take you?"
"It took," Garry replied (and I could tell that he just purely loved saying these numbers), "twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes."
The guard stared at us, as if amazed. "What'd you guys do," he asked, "walk?"
AFTERWORD
J
erzy adamuszek failed to answer any letters and we were never able to locate him. He may have dropped off the face of the earth.
The 1988 Guinness Book of World Records accepted Prince Pierre D' Arenberg's documentation. He held the record, fifty-six days, for the drive Garry Sowerby and I made in well under half that time.
The book, however, had gone to press while we were on the road. In 1989, the editors awarded a distinguished international team of endurance drivers that record. There was even a picture of the distinguished team in the 1989 edition: two men in dirty clothes standing by their vehicle and looking, I suppose, reasonably heroic. The caption under the photo was extremely poetic. It read:
"Longest drive south to north: Garry Sowerby and Tim Cahill drove this car from the southern tip of South America to the northern edge of Alaska (with one detour by water) in less than twenty-four days, Sept. 29 to Oct. 22, 1987."