Posted by intuitivefred888
When Gasoline was 5 to 6 dollars a gallon many years ago now I drove south to Big Sur, California and found this older gas station charging the 6 dollars a gallon there and since I was low on gas likely bought 5 or 10 gallons because Big Sur is sort of remote along the coast on Highway 1.
But, they also had this wooden spoke wheel from an old car there so I took a picture of it and put it on my blog here.
My father told me stories of traveling from California to Breckenridge Texas on Dirt roads in the early 1920s. He was born in Arizona in 1916. The thing is the tried and true method for over 100 years was wooden spoke wheels (as long as you weren't going very fast) and he said NO one sane went above 25 miles per hour then in the 1920s because the roads were only good in cities and sometimes not even then. So, you didn't want a metal wheel because the rocks might bend it on rocky dirt roads whereas there is more give at slower speeds with wooden wheels as long as you brought an extra wooden wheel and a tire pump so if you broke a wheel on a dip or rock or whatever you could change your wheel and tire and inner tube. So, until highways got to be better than dirt or rock roads everywhere likely starting in the 1930s wooden wheels were the best way to travel across really awful roads to other destinations on early versions of automobiles and trucks then.
He spoke of alkali roads in Arizona and maybe in New Mexico too where only the driver wasn't crying from the alkali in their eyes because they wore goggles on these awful roads. If it rained people didn't travel at least by car or truck because they would get stuck in the mud also outside of larger cities.
HE said that the sores inside your mouth from the alkali dust took a month or two to heal and also sores on your face from the Alkali. Extreme alkaline can have the same effect in some ways as extreme acidic and alkali is in the dust if you don't have paved roads to stop the dust.
So, only Train travel was safe in rain and not car or truck travel then outside of cities in the early 1900s until at least 1930. But, also this time flying was becoming a way to transport the mail sort of like an air born pony express then too.
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