Long trip with difference

Press, 12 November 1981, Page 15

Long trip with difference

One hot day in 1969, Trevor Cullen — then a young navy chef — dived into a local creek to cool off. He crashed straight into a

sandstone rock below the surface, and broke his neck. It was seven years before Trevor, a quadraplegic, came out of hospital. The future did

not look bright. He would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. On August 11, 1981, Trevor Cullen returned to New Zealand after celebrating the International Year for Disabled Persons by driving 27.000 miles through the United States. Trevor made the trip through 50 states, at the wheel of his own - Honda Civic, driving by means of hand-worked throttle and brake controls which he had designed and built himself for just $l5. He said he had chosen the Honda as a strilll car which combined very reliable engineering with a good automatic gearbox which simplified conversion to a complete set of hand controls. “I wanted to show people all over America what someone like me can do — and I wanted to help publicise the I.Y.D. throughout the United States,” he said. When Trevor started planning, he was working for Air New Zealand on a voluntary basis. His job was to teach the cabin staff how to look after disables people. Through the airline he arranged a deal to return for publicity to get himself and his Civic fo Los Angeles. New Zealand Motor Corporation gave him Honda contacts throughout America. He took a male nurse friend, John Pansters. with him. But being a determined character, he let John drive only when — for some reason or other — they had to cover the same road twice. The first leg was 1400 miles from Los Angeles to Vancouver, then after that, across the Rockies and 2000 miles to Chicago. The weather in the mountains was atrocious. It was still snowing a blizzard the night they came down into Montana with a foot of ice on the front of the car, and the lights barely like candles. In lowa, he took part in

radio talk-back on a show run by a quadraplegic. In New York, he spoke on radio for the blind. At Dayton, Ohio, he visited a Honda plant which turned out a motorcycle every 55 seconds. Toronto was' next. He visited a New Zealander running a new $3 million “variety village" complex for disabled children, then on to Boston and New York, where his back number plate was stolen. Undaunted Trevor removed the front plate as well — then drove through 25 more States with no number plates at all. Getting new ones in the States is apparently a bureaucratic battle. At Philadelphia, he visited a driving school for the disabled where people begin on a simulator which tests their reactions. and predicts whether they will pass or fail before they take to the road. South through Carolina dn Georgia to Florida, his Civic was still going well. In 27,000 miles, he says, it had an oil and grease and two new fuel filters, but did not even need tuning. Their road crossed the Rockies at 13.000 feet, then down into the Utah desert and temperatures of 113 deg f. “I drove with wet toweals on my head. Inside the car. it was 20 degrees hotter still." “We drove through Death Valley at midnight with the temperature at 106 deg F on a 13-hour hike back to Los Angeles.” “Then we headed north on a 6000-mile round trip to Alaska,” he said. The the way back, the Civic developed its first and only serious “fault.” “A broken windscreen — we covered 1200 miles on gravel during that leg,” he said. The only way they could keep dry through hail storms was to pall off the road and patch the screen with a clear plastic raincoat, weighted down with rocks. He finished the trip in Los Angeles by helping to make a television commercial — “Why I love my Honda,” for national use in America. “I meant every word of it,” says Trevor.