Monument Valley, the Hard Way

This photo of my Mustang in Monument Valley looks like the result of a carefully planned American road trip.

It was not.

By the time it was taken, I had spent three months waiting for the wrong people to fix the car, run out of money and broken down just three kilometres into the journey.

The fact that the Mustang made it there at all is only part of the story.

Here is how it happened.

My name is Niko. My family is from Greece, but I was born and raised in Germany. Ever since I was a little boy, I had been in love with Mustangs and promised myself that one day, somehow, I would own one.

In 2016, at the tender age of 27, I decided it was time to stop dreaming and actually do it.

I had taken six months off work—a sabbatical of sorts—and wanted to travel across the US and Canada. But instead of simply renting a car, I wanted to buy the Mustang I had dreamed about since childhood and make it part of the adventure.

So I boarded a plane with $15,000 in my pocket, no real idea what I was getting myself into and a whole lot of hope.

I just had no idea where to start.

California, Florida and New York felt a little too obvious. I wanted to go somewhere where I would not run into German tourists on every corner. So, for reasons that somehow made perfect sense to me at the time, I chose Montana.

I contacted the local Mustang club in Missoula and received a reply from its president, Marty. He seemed slightly surprised that some guy from Germany wanted to fly to Montana and buy a Mustang, but his answer was basically:

“Sure. Come to Missoula. We’ll help you find one.”

As Marty was not in the best of health, he introduced me to some of the other club members. Let’s call them the Montana Boys.

They regularly attended events with Carroll Shelby and were often the only people there from Montana. Whenever Shelby saw them, he knew exactly who they were: his boys from Montana.

One of them was Owen, who more or less took me by the hand and started driving around the Missoula area with me, looking at Mustangs for sale.

We saw several cars. Some were nice, some were less nice, but none of them really clicked.

Then Owen mentioned that a friend of his had been talking about selling his Mustang. He also told me it was a K-code.

At that point, I had absolutely no idea what a K-code was.

He tried to explain why the engine was special and why the car was worth looking at. All I really understood was that it cost around one or two thousand dollars more than the other Mustangs I had seen.

Naturally, I said no.

Owen kept talking.

Eventually, I gave in and agreed to take a look.

That is how I ended up buying an early 1965 Ford Mustang K-code in Prairie Bronze with a Palomino interior.

The car ran well and was in pretty decent condition. But the perfectionist in me did not want to drive a fifty-year-old Mustang across an entire continent without having it properly checked first. I also assumed that getting the work done in the US would be much cheaper than doing it later in Germany.

The plan was simple: fit new tyres and check the brakes, wheel bearings, steering, suspension, cooling system, belts, hoses, fluids and ignition. Just the usual things you would want to look at before taking an old car on a very long road trip.

Owen had recommended Gary at Cherry Lane Motors in Lolo from the beginning.

Instead, I allowed myself to be talked into using a mechanic I had met completely by chance. He promised that he could do everything faster and for less money than Gary.

As it turned out, he could do neither.

While he was working on the car, I also sent the engine to a company that was supposed to rebuild and freshen it up.

Unfortunately, they did not seem to know much more than the mechanic did.

At one point, they told me that my original HiPo cylinder heads were damaged and could no longer be used. I was thousands of miles from home, already deep into the project and in no position to argue, so I suddenly had to find another set.

That was how I discovered the HPM eKschange and met Fred Ballard, probably its most important contributor and one of the key figures in that original community.

Fred immediately offered to help. He found me a set of HiPo heads at a very fair price and somehow even managed to find ones with date codes that matched my engine.

A few years later, I had my original heads properly inspected.

They were completely fine.

But that is a different story.

During my travels, I later drove to California to meet Fred in person. I did not know it then, but this entire chain of problems would eventually bring me deep into the K-code community.

Years later, after the original HPM eKschange had been taken offline, I rebuilt it and brought it back under its current name, the HiPo eKschange. Today, I run the eKschange and am also the founder of the HiPo Registry.

None of that would have happened if everything had simply gone according to plan.

What should have been a fairly straightforward job turned into almost three months in Montana, with very little actually happening.

At this point, you may reasonably be wondering why I did not load the car onto a trailer, take it somewhere else and start over.

The answer is simple: I had run out of money.

I had already paid deposits, committed to the work and spent far more than planned. I could have tried to fight for the money legally, but that would have delayed everything even further—and I still would not have had a working car in the meantime.

So I was stuck.

That is why I kept asking, waiting and hoping that the people I had trusted would finally finish what they had promised.

After countless conversations, polite reminders, repeated requests and probably more patience than I knew I had, the car was finally ready.

To be honest, I had genuinely enjoyed my time in Montana. Even without a car, I met wonderful people and made friendships that have lasted to this day.

But after almost three months, I was more than ready to leave.

I packed the few things I had into my backpack, threw it over my shoulder and headed out to collect the Mustang.

I was completely fired up.

After all the delays, waiting and frustration, the trip I had imagined for so long was finally about to begin.

I loaded my belongings into the car, turned the key and drove away.

For approximately three kilometres.

Then there was a loud bang.

A moment later, coolant was spraying everywhere, and my long-awaited journey had come to an abrupt end almost before it had begun.

I brought the Mustang to Gary at Cherry Lane Motors in Lolo—the very person Owen had recommended from the beginning.

Gary was completely booked and told me that it would probably be at least another week or two before he could properly look at the Mustang.

He knew how long I had already been waiting and how badly I wanted to begin the trip. Apparently, my story—and probably the look on my face—was enough to make him feel sorry for me.

Not only did he offer me his own Lincoln Mark VIII so that I could finally get on the road, but he also took me into his home and gave me a place to sleep for the night.

The following morning, I left Montana in Gary’s Lincoln.

So instead of travelling across North America in the Mustang I had just bought, I began the journey in the personal car of a mechanic I had only just met.

At that point, very little about the trip was going according to plan.

But somehow, that had started to become the plan.

Over the next two months, I drove across the United States and Canada. I crossed the Arizona desert, travelled through snow and over icy roads and eventually made it all the way to Labrador in the far northeast.

By the time I returned to Montana, I had covered almost 20,000 kilometres, or roughly 12,400 miles.

Gary handed me the keys to the Mustang, and finally, after months of waiting, I could begin the journey I had originally come for.

There was just one small issue.

I only had around two weeks before the Mustang had to be in Buffalo, New York, to be handed over for shipping to Antwerp.

So what followed was basically a speedrun across the United States.

I drove along Route 66, through Monument Valley and across the country towards New York.

But since I apparently had not spent enough time driving by that point, I decided to cross into Canada once more and spend a few more days travelling there before heading back to Buffalo.

I even ended up driving the Mustang through snow on my way towards Toronto.

I will never forget the look on the face of one Canadian police officer when he checked my documents.

He looked at me, looked at the car, looked back at the paperwork and said:

“Let me make sure I have this right. You are a Greek citizen with a German driving licence, driving a 1965 Ford Mustang with an American title and Montana licence plates, and you are here in Toronto, Canada?”

“Yes,” I said.

We looked at each other for a second and then both started laughing.

Eventually, I crossed back into the United States, reached Buffalo, handed the Mustang over for shipping and flew home to Germany.

A few weeks later, the car arrived in Antwerp and finally made its way to Germany.

In total, over those six months, I covered more than 33,000 kilometres, or around 20,500 miles, in the Lincoln and the Mustang.

Looking back, a great deal went wrong.

But the delays, breakdowns and questionable decisions introduced me to people I would otherwise never have met. They brought me into the K-code community and eventually led to me rebuilding the eKschange and creating the HiPo Registry, where we are now documenting these cars and their stories one by one.

None of that would have happened if I had taken the straight and easy road.

So despite everything, I do not regret any of it.

Perhaps this photo is not just the end of one story.

In many ways, it is where the next one began.

A few people have asked me whether I will ever turn the whole story into a video. If it goes down well here, perhaps I finally will.