WAGON TRAIN
It was oddly appropriate that our migratory party of eight would suffer a wagon calamity on the California Trail. It’s a fate that befell many of the Gold Rush pioneers and other westward travelers whose tracks we’d been following.
Our quartet of modern, reliable transportation was slated to journey in five days what took our 19th century ancestors five months. Those early pioneers dealth with 50-inch wooden wheels, broken trails, and death by dehydration. We had winter tires, paved roads, and Egyptian cotton bedsheets. Still, we should have known better. Ghosts haunted our path.
By the side of a pitch-black, wind-swept two-lane Wyoming highway, our plan became as mangled as our Buick. The story we’d begun the day before was over. Right there and then, we knew this couldn’t be your typical road trip story or comparison test—we can’t fully review what we can’t drive.
Instead, we’ll recount the journey the way our forebears would have when they finally reached the Golden State—a tale told by those who survived it, gathered around a campfire and reliving their adventures. After all, the pages of Motor Trend make excellent kindling.
CHANGING TIMES The road might be paved today, but the sights along I-80, which roughly mirrors the California Trail route, haven’t changed much over 175 years.
DAY 1: Independence, Missouri
Alisa: The Priddle clan landed first and took possession of two wagons, the 2018 Subaru Outback 3.6R and the 2018 Volkswagen Golf Alltrack TSI 4Motion—just as the Evans, Seabaugh, and Walker families touched down. Soon, they had the new 2018 Regal TourX and our Volvo V60 Cross Country support wagon in hand.
Scott: It was too bad we couldn’t include the Volvo in the comparison like we had planned, but with the all-new model announced literally as we were getting on the plane, it just wasn’t fair to pit the Volvo’s previous generation against three brand-new models.
Christian: May as well have had a prairie wagon and oxen in the comparison.
Alisa: Wagon trains were full of women and children, so it only made sense that we traveled as families, too.
Scott: I think our spouses had different ideas of what this was going to be. Kathryn kept asking what we were actually going to do each day. It was strangely hard to explain we’d just drive until we either got hungry, hit a waypoint, or came across something the photographers liked.
Alisa: Steve expected long days and lots of waiting around but that each stop would be an opportunity to soak in the surroundings.
Yeah, Elayna expected both but also thoughtfarther than the 400 miles a day we averaged. But the style is more representative of what the pioneers did. You go until you stop. Who knows where the next food, water, or restroom will be?
