At 55 Miles Per Hour in a Vintage Volkswagen, Texas Looks Just Right

Not an hour outside of Texarkana, Jerry starts to sputter. The 1965 Volkswagen Type 2, colloquially known as a microbus, has long been the workhorse among Gary Alexander’s Volkswagens, which currently number 21. Jerry is the vehicle Alexander chooses for annual camping excursions to Big Bend National Park and for road trips from Arkansas to New Mexico. But Jerry, at 59 years old, is also something of a Frankenstein’s monster, patinaed sage and patched together from whatever parts Alexander can source. And today, at the start of a group trek that will extend hundreds of miles across Texas, one of those parts is going haywire. 

“We’ve got a generator light on up here. Smelling rubber,” Alexander crackles over his CB radio to the caravan of roughly twenty VWs behind us, as the bus creaks and groans like a ship blowing into port. “Y’all keep rolling. I’ll catch up.”

He maneuvers Jerry to the shoulder of Interstate 30, looks left and right, and, without so much as a “hold on tight,” plows down the steep grassy swale and onto the frontage road. As dishes clang and his speckled rescue mutt Willie Boy whines and his hula-girl dash ornament wiggles, I’m grateful Alexander has installed seat belts in the vehicle. 

Earlier this morning, as he shouted instructions at the crew of drivers assembled before him at Olive Street Vintiques, his sister’s Texarkana antiques shop, one might have thought that Alexander would make a good politician. Tall, lean, and sporting a cropped gray cut with undertones of fading ginger, he’s possessed of the sort of innate folksiness and penchant for animated gesticulation that makes you feel as though he could persuade you to do just about anything. Which is pretty much how we all got here today. 

“You all right?” Alexander asks me once the suspension stops rattling. He didn’t feel safe parking the bus on the side of the freeway, he explains, and figured it could handle the dive. “Didn’t think you’d get that experience on the first day, I bet,” he says. “But that’s what this kinda thing is all about.” This kinda thing being what Alexander has dubbed the first-ever Texas U.S. Route 67 VW Road Trip.

U.S. 67 has many names. It is, in various places, Highways 84 and 377 and 90, Interstates 30 and 10. It’s East San Antonio and North Patrick and West Seventh and South Loop. It’s a twelve-lane thoroughfare and a two-lane Main Street. It traverses the Piney Woods and scrubby Central Texas and the Permian Basin and the Chihuahuan Desert. If you took a photo in every town along 67, you could make a flip-book of just about every landscape Texas contains. 

The road begins in Sabula, Iowa, then cuts south through Illinois and Missouri and crosses the Mississippi River twice before bending around the Ozarks. When it reaches East Texas, it begins a 638-mile diagonal westward slash through the state. It’s that piece, which begins in Texarkana and ends at the Rio Grande, that we’ll be navigating via Alexander’s four-day itinerary stacked with roadside attractions and historical oddities. 

Alexander, by day a Round Rock science teacher, and his buddy David Saucier, a school resource officer from La Porte who drives a 1967 zenith-blue Beetle, started kicking around the idea about three years ago. The pair, who head up Austin Air Coolers VW Gang and the Bay Area Volkswagen Club, respectively, met some fifteen years back at a car show and have been collaborating on meetups ever since. The 67 trip is their most ambitious to date, with the straitlaced Saucier responsible for the historical investigation—“I looked up all the stops and gave him the list,” he says—and the energetic Alexander in charge of contacting chambers of commerce to provide the group with publicity and logistics support.

For weeks the pair worried that they’d be the only participants rolling across the finish line. But club members quickly signed on, and numbers swelled with additions from locales as far-flung as Tennessee and California when Alexander began to promote the trip on his popular YouTube channel, VW Life. He credits the oddball appeal of Route 67. “Everyone knows Route 66,” Alexander says. “Volkswagen folks, though, we’re always one beat off.”

U.S. 67 was so designated in 1926, when the U.S. Numbered Highway System replaced the patchwork of privately maintained auto trails with a grid suitable for the age of the mass-produced Model T. In Texas these roads—many of them long, rugged, narrow spans—quickly became the stuff of western lore. Route 66, which sliced across the Panhandle ferrying migrants toward the gold-lush Pacific Coast, is the most enduring symbol of that epoch of Americana—though it was technically removed from the system in 1985 and replaced, in Texas, by Interstate 40. 

The Interstate Highway System, a more robust network of freeways, has wrought considerable damage on U.S. cities since it was signed into law, in 1956. Construction through urban areas displaced roughly a million residents, including countless communities of color. A related effect was the diversion of traffic around cities and towns, which many believe starved them of travelers-through. “Texas really goofed up in the sixties when they started building loops around their little towns,” Alexander says. “They all dried up.”

Take Alexander’s birthplace: while 67 still cuts straight through Texarkana, I-30, I-49, and I-369 form a ring around the city, routing out-of-towners toward a parade of suburban fast fooderies and chain hotels. Though the city is in the midst of an ambitious revitalization effort, it’s tough not to notice that its downtown is dead silent on a Monday at rush hour. 

Most of the Volkswagens we’re driving today weren’t built for 80-mile-per-hour freeways. The first Beetle rolled off a steamship into the American market in 1949, and some of these cars weren’t far behind. Nearly all of them have air-cooled engines, a design popular in the midcentury that is simpler but more finicky than today’s water-cooled options. Few can haul it above 60 miles per hour for long. Which, Alexander argues, makes them perfect for this sort of adventure. Being forced to travel at Jerry’s max speed of 55—maybe 58, if the wind is behind him—lets you take in surroundings that might otherwise be a blur. 

“I grew up in Texas, and I love Texas history,” Alexander says. “I’m always intrigued by old highways, I guess because I drive old Volkswagens, and all the strange sites and the lost things that you don’t get on the interstates. We’re going to give them a little more love.” 

Or, as the stickers he created to commemorate the journey put it, we will “See Texas!!! Like It Was Intended.”

No fees are required to take part in this trip, and over the course of four days, various VW fanatics will come along for short stints as they get word we’re passing through. But our core manifest is as follows: five sixties-era Beetles; nine two-panel-windshield Westfalia and Riviera buses; seven later-era Vanagons; and a boxy, off-road-capable seventies convertible sold in America as the Thing. 

Only one vehicle among our lot—a 2019 Golf R in an iridescent factory fuchsia that the manufacturer calls Traffic Purple—can really take, at pace, the punishing first-day stretch around Dallas, 95 miles that merge U.S. 67 with I-30 and then I-35. The Golf is thus the only one to double back and make sure Jerry’s all right when we careen off the road. As we continue, its owner will be our videographer, carrier pigeon, and sheepdog. 

Jessica Jones is at home in all those roles. The forty-year-old Lockhart-based optical sales rep is the only woman traveling alone on this trip, among solo men and couples. Slim and long-legged and always outfitted in pink to match her ride, she’s unique, too, in her collector’s interests, focusing on modern cars in limited runs and flashy colors that appeal to her Instagram followers. Among her five VWs, her show car is a 2000 white Cabrio with lavender rims. 

“When I stop and think that I took a week off work to drive across Texas with a bunch of strangers, it seems crazy,” says Jones, as I load into her car for the start of day two at Dinosaur Valley State Park, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. Her devotion to Volkswagens started with the first car she bought. “I was in an accident that broke my hip, and the police officer said, ‘This car saved your life.’ After that I was like, ‘Okay, I’m done. I’ll always have a Volkswagen.’ ” 

She met Alexander when she moved to Central Texas from Houston: looking for a new community, she heard about his monthly meetups at Top Notch, a renowned North Austin burger joint. “They don’t shun you because you have new Volkswagens,” she says. “They all have them too. They’re just at home.” 

Tuesday’s drive, to Brownwood, is a far less grueling slog for antique and modern alike. We’re covering fewer than half as many miles as the day before, leaving time for stops. Alexander has a theory about what determines whether locales thrive or languish along the highway: “If the speed limit drops below forty, that town’s doing all right.” 

Dublin, a North Texas town of about six thousand, is persuasive evidence. As the speed limit slows to 35 miles per hour, we pass grand Victorians bedecked in shamrock decor; Granny Clark’s, a famed buffet on the strip, is packed at lunchtime with work trucks. We stop in front of the enterprise that built the city: Dublin Bottling Works, the first independent bottler—and, more recently, litigation target—of Dr Pepper. 

Saucier has used a family connection to score us a tour, the first the plant has given since 2020. Before the pandemic its museum would see more than ten thousand visitors a year, our guide tells us. The number hasn’t recovered yet, but seeing folks like us come through, he says, gives him hope.

By evening, after driving nearly a hundred miles southwest, we reach Brownwood, where 67 becomes Early Boulevard. Alexander gathers the troops around an oddly shaped bench that is regarded, half-seriously, as the world’s biggest railroad spike—the city of 19,000 on Pecan Bayou is home to the Lehnis Railroad Museum—and gives instructions before we part ways for the night: van folks to the campground, Beetles and beyond to the Best Western. As he talks, two locals in car-show T-shirts mill around on the edge of our group. 

Classic autos always draw eyeballs, but Volkswagens seem to tap into a deeper affection, whether because of the Beetle’s popularity or the bus’s countercultural symbolism. At every stop, folks gather to gawk, wave, and chatter. Such is the case with these gentlemen, who saw our caravan and followed along to invite us to their weekly car-club meetup at the local Sonic. As we file in and park among their rides, the Brownwood motorheads are eager to regale us with tales of their VWs past. “Everybody’s owned a Volkswagen,” Jones says, “so everybody’s got a story they want to tell you.” 

“The eastern rim of the world”: that’s how Cormac McCarthy, in All the Pretty Horses, describes looking out from a ranch in San Angelo. The city of 100,000 sits along one of the state’s geographical and cultural fault lines, where verdant deciduous trees and brisket briefly overlap with rocky yellow ranches and Hatch chiles. 

Among San Angelo’s exports are the best of what Texas is known for—soldiers, rodeo champions, and oil—and 67 has been a facilitator of them all. The establishment of the route coincided with San Angelo’s boom years in the twenties and thirties. But in the fifties, the construction of I-10 and I-20 saw the city suddenly bypassed as its downtown began to fall into disrepair. Alexander’s itinerary, though, makes clear that substantial preservation investments have revived a great deal of the core. After he takes us on a swoop past the immaculate river walk, we post up at Fort Concho for lunch. 

Day three will be one of malfunctions. Beyond the eastern rim, 67 becomes pump jacks, solar farms, and wind turbines. The earth turns sandy and the vegetation changes; the abundance of tasty nopales makes me wish I’d brought along a machete and a grill. We’ve left a married couple with an electrical problem behind in Ballinger, and we twice park the entire caravan on the shoulder to help Alexander diagnose a fuel leak. Pushing the limits of the antique engines between far-flung outposts, we’re desperate for a gas stop by the time we reach Rankin, population 1,089—but when we head for the restrooms, also an urgency, we learn they’re out of commission. The town, about a hundred miles west of San Angelo, hasn’t had water for days. Soon we’ll suspect that one of those pumps was serving bad gas as we bid farewell to a smoking Riviera. 

Around Fort Stockton our highway joins with I-10 for 25 miles. But it also receives another moniker: la Entrada al Pacífico, the international trade corridor that connects Topolobampo, a coastal city in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, to Midland and Odessa. It’s here, in Fort Stockton, that we rest for the night before the final day’s sprint toward the border. 

Before that, though, is a destination whose repute appears to excite everyone: the world-famous small town of Marfa, where 67 becomes East San Antonio, with easy access to prix fixe restaurants and upscale hotels and esoteric installations. With three hours to kill before setting sail anew, Jones insists we head for the art installation Prada Marfa (actually located in nearby Valentine) and persuades me and a bemused Saucier to join her.

When we arrive after a quick half-hour drive, Saucier, who minutes ago thought we had taken this detour to indulge in some luxury shopping, beams as he poses in his Beetle for a photo to send to his three daughters. They blow up his phone the whole way back celebrating his exposure to Texas’s most Instagrammable town. 

Our last southward hour is a Kerouacian fantasy, as our convoy of twenty-plus vehicles navigates S curves on a narrow two-laner that snakes through deep brown agave-dotted mountains. This piece of highway is harsh and gloriously lonely. It’s everything Americans envision the frontier to be.

It’s also reportedly become more hazardous of late. In 2021 the Presidio-Ojinaga port of entry opened as a crossing for transmigrantes, drivers who transport secondhand U.S. goods to Central America. Accidents, I’m told, have increased because of congestion created by the trucks, leading frustrated drivers to ignore passing rules on perilous turns. 

I get a taste of this as, in the middle of my Sal Paradise daydream, a U.S. Border Patrol truck appears hot in the rearview. When he reaches a point about two feet from our bumper, the agent throws on his lights and sirens and swerves ahead of us to straddle the median line. With a blind hook just twenty yards or so away, an F-150 comes flying at him head-on, and the agent edges back into our lane, nearly sending the silver Beetle two cars in front of us off the road and over a steep drop.

When we finally arrive blissfully intact in Presidio, we’re greeted by Joe and Laura Portillo, community fixtures who are the county judge and the assistant superintendent for Presidio ISD, respectively. They’re also the owners of a 1973 orange convertible Super Beetle—so when Alexander contacted the city’s chamber of commerce to alert it to our arrival, the red carpet unfurled. The couple has arranged for us to have a police escort for a last-mile victory parade down O’Reilly Street, which forces us to linger in our cars as everything comes together. But air coolers aren’t air-conditioned, nor can they sit for long in the desert without overheating. We sweat as we wait to get into formation behind the officers, and folks start to worry whether we’ll make it the last mile at all.

Crawling toward our finish line, though, we begin to appreciate the ceremony. On the front of the white stucco American Legion hall, city officials have affixed a four-foot-wide banner with the highway’s shield, and as we park in a row on these last few feet of 67, stretching our legs and shedding layers in the high late-afternoon sun, there’s a sense of relief and accomplishment of a kind so vanishingly scant these days that some of us might feel as if we’ve traveled back in time. Few of us reach for our phones or even really want to talk. It’s enough to watch the sky fade to pink and enjoy the evening. 

Inside, a band is hollering a cover of “Lamento Boliviano,” creamy, tongue-scalding rajas are on offer, and Laura is serving diesel-grade mezcal from a bottle containing a scorpion. Outside, Volkswageneers and Presidians exchange technical specs. As I head to say goodbyes, I find Alma Jo Barrera, an Army vet from Belton, setting up her orange Vanagon for the night.

“My therapist loves when I try to explain the family to her,” Barrera says. “Six months ago, I had a battle buddy who committed suicide, and that sent me for a bad spiral. So I went online, and I posted, ‘Hey guys, I’m in a dark place right now. I need you all to share a good memory that you had with me.’ ” 

She hands me her phone, open to her Facebook page. In the comments are dozens of VW folks relating reminiscences—times when Barrera helped them out with a part, stories of her pet prairie dog riding in the van. The draw of the family is apparent: in the Volkswagen scene, Barrera has found community, a scarcity in a time when the constant churn for expedience is fraying all our bonds.

We’re not encouraged, we’re barely permitted, to go slowly anymore. But when you’re forced to amble, you’re afforded the opportunity to engage—to see Texas the way it was intended. Tomorrow we’ll all go our separate ways, back to our homes and to our grinds. I, for one, will try to keep riding at 55 a while longer.  

This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Presidio by Morning (Lord Willing).” Subscribe today.