The 10 Best Places To Find An Affordable Classic Car Pt 10: Driving Back Roads on the Weekends

Part X:  3. Driving Back Roads on the Weekends

Sometimes we have to look for an excuse to take our affordable classics out on the weekends. Our next best place to find an affordable classic car might not be the most efficient, but it may just be the most fun.

VW bus along Route 66 near Seligman, AZ

The drive to the coffee shop or bookstore is never long enough, for me anyway, when I’m in my weekend fun car. One of the most fun ways to enjoy your car is taking it out onto rural back roads with twists and turns, a 55 mile per hour speed limit, and perhaps a good lunch option an hour or so away that you can loosely use as your destination or reason for the drive.

While out on drives like these keep your eyes open for cars parked in the front yards of farm houses with plywood signs leaning up against cars with “4 SALE” painted on them. Some great deals can be found like this, if you’re lucky enough to drive past something that interests you.

During the summers I drive from the Twin Cities down to Road America, a wonderful road racing circuit about an hour north of Milwaukee in Elkhart Lake, WI. I have to cross most of Wisconsin on two lane roads as there is no good interstate route from west to east that gets me to the track. Along this drive I’ve seen some cars worth stopping for. I saw a Volkswagen Beetle, just a standard sedan from the mid 70s, for “$800 obo” painted on the sign leaning against it.

It made me wish I was driving a pick up truck with an empty trailer behind me. The car was orange, one of my favorite period colors for those cars. It was in decent shape, from 20 feet anyway. I couldn’t see any rust, although one would have to assume there was some lurking in the floor boards. The point is, with $800 obo on the sign, you’ve got to think the guy would have given it to me for $500 if I were to take it out of his front yard for him. If he wouldn’t want to take just $500 for it, maybe I could get his wife involved, you know she’d take $500 for it just to make it disappear. At the very least it would have been a fun project to clean up and sell back in the cities where a much larger, urban population could be reached for the sale.

On that same drive over the past few years I’ve seen mostly American cars on the side of the road for sale. Old Ford Mustangs, Corvettes, tons of Camaros in various stages of disassembly, on blocks, with weeds growing up around them. I saw a Porsche 944 Turbo two years ago. Sure, that car probably needed a new turbo and tons of other things, but if you can buy these cars cheap enough, put them on a trailer and take them back to a city you can put them on Craigslist and reach a large audience, or, depending upon the car, put it on eBay and put it out on the national market.

"4 Sale" A potential street rod project along Route 66 in Missouri.

I drove Old Route 66 from Illinois to L.A. a few years ago in a Volkswagen Westfalia, and I have never seen more cool cars just sitting out in fields, parked next to old garages, behind barns. I saw something worth stopping for every day I was on the road during that trip. I’d love to do it again someday with a car trailer.

A lot of the cars you may find this way could have real issues, they could have been seriously neglected, they could be rusty if they’ve been sitting behind the barn for a long time, but there are cars worth pulling out of such circumstances. If you get lucky you might get a look inside a barn or two and see something that might really be worth picking up.

While it isn’t the fastest way to find your next affordable classic, if you keep your eyes peeled while you’re driving the back roads and you get lucky, you could find an incredible deal on a car you wouldn’t have expected to find out in the middle of no where. If you don’t find anything… it was just a nice afternoon lunch at the end of a fun drive. Be sure to take a different way home so you can drive a new route and increase your chances of coming across something interesting parked on the side of the road.