Before a single mile of highway had passed beneath them, Chris’s car was already in a transmission shop somewhere in Los Angeles. Sam Newton stood in the parking lot outside his father’s repair garage on day zero of a 2,000-mile road trip through the American Southwest, staring at a plan that was already going sideways, and smiling anyway. What five friends were attempting, three classic cars running on age and optimism across some of the most unforgiving terrain in the country, was either a great story or a cautionary tale, and probably both.
The cars, the crew, and the king of burritos
The trip had been years in the making by the time the team finally pointed west. Sam had grown up watching his father, Bill Newton, fill a Subaru repair shop floor-to-ceiling with car memorabilia collected across decades: a 1950 Mercury F-150 truck, a 1941 Ford pickup with a flathead engine and candy apple primer, photographs and parts stacked like a physical autobiography. Bill, who described himself on the record as 47 years old with 42 years of Subaru experience and an expertise mainly in burritos, offered his blessing in characteristically understated fashion before the convoy left. ‘I hope you guys get to Utah safely and return safely with no car problems,’ he said. ‘We’ll see.’
Chris and Sam drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to collect Vinnie, while Connor made the long haul south from Vancouver to meet them in St. George, Utah, where Kyla joined and the full team was finally assembled. They marked the occasion with an impromptu roadside birthday party for Connor, complete with off-key singing, and caught their first sunset of the trip from a parking lot. ‘Of course, this is the first sunset we get,’ someone said, ‘in a parking lot.’
Capitol Reef at sunrise and the things that kept going wrong
After 500 miles, the three classic cars were together on the road for the first time, freshly cleaned and running better than anyone had a right to expect. The first big destination was Capitol Reef, Utah, where sandstone monoliths carved over millions of years by wind and water glow a deep amber at first light. The team camped on-site and woke before dawn to catch the sunrise, and the landscape delivered exactly what the bucket list had promised.
Then things started unraveling, methodically and almost comically. Sam left a camera on the hood of his car and it fell and broke, along with the lens. The group hiked out and returned to find one of the cars sunk and stuck in a parking lot in 100-degree heat, immovable for two hours. Sam then realized his lenses were sitting in a hotel room four hours behind them, which meant renting a car and burning an entire day driving eight hours round-trip to retrieve them. Then came the first real breakdown, Chris’s car losing power steering and leaking from a fuel line on the side of the road.
Connor diagnosed it correctly on the spot: a hose clamp. Sam put it plainly afterward: ‘I’m performative as hell. Anytime you see me leaning into a car, I’m not doing anything. I’m just looking at stuff I don’t know anything about.’ AAA was called, the repair was manageable, and a delay at the lake rewarded the group with what several of them called the best sunset of the whole trip. Vinnie then destroyed his lens filter and Connor’s lens in quick succession. The bad luck had stopped being a surprise and started being a running theme.
The last few hundred miles
With roughly 1,800 miles behind them and the end of the trip in sight, something shifted. The breakdowns had stripped away the performance of the adventure and left the actual thing underneath, which turned out to be five people in old cars watching the desert go by. The final destination was a cliffside camping spot Sam described simply as ‘probably the sickest spot of the entire trip,’ reached by a rocky, steep drive that the 1972 Ford Bronco, unrestored, original, handled with the kind of stubborn reliability that makes people fall in love with old machines.
Sitting around the fire on the last night, Sam kept coming back to his father’s shop and why those walls covered in old car photographs had always seemed like more than a decoration. After 2,000 miles, the answer had clarified.
Bill Newton’s garage, seen differently now
Sam had walked into that shop before the trip and seen car parts and memorabilia. He walked away from the trip understanding that what his father had actually been collecting was memory. The cars were never the point.
The final leg of the drive also produced a moment Sam hadn’t expected. Somewhere near Hanksville, a stranger approached and mentioned that one of Sam’s earlier films had reached him at a low point after he had moved to a new country, had a son, and felt adrift. He had picked up a camera because of it. The two took a selfie by the side of the road and went their separate ways. Sam, running on no sleep, said it gave him a small, unearned boost that carried him the rest of the day.
By the end, the broken cameras, the stuck car, the eight-hour detour, and the fuel line on the shoulder of a Utah highway had become the trip rather than interruptions to it. ‘Cars are going to break, cameras are going to break, and things are going to go wrong,’ Sam said around the cliffside fire. What remained, after all of it, was the fire itself and the four people sitting around it.
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