I have always liked the notion of a 24-hour race. Le Mans, of course. And here in the UAE, we have the 24 Hours of Dubai.

The annual UAE event began today and finishes tomorrow, and we talked in the office about when the toughest part to drive for 24 hours might be … and just before dawn is my choice. Though this sort of race has multiple drivers, of course. One all-women team has five drivers. And the drivers get time to rest.

And eventually thinking about driving through the night took me back. Way back. To when I did it with my 16-year-old brother in a 1964 red Mustang.

It was a hare-brained scheme. Most of my plans involving cars and long drives are hare-brained schemes. (Like driving 240 miles to Las Vegas to cover a fight, then driving back the same 240 miles after filing, beginning at about midnight and ending, barely awake, at 3 a.m. Which I did about 20 times. It is a miracle I’m alive.)

Anyway, the Mustang and my brother … was 1975. A long time ago.

I was a fan of board war games. They were fairly big, back then. Before computers, of course. So, you could buy games on this or that battle or campaign, and re-fight them — with little squares of cardboard representing a military unit, and a single die to determine results of battle on a piece of terrain represented on a map.

So, the community of war-gamers was staging a convention at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland — on the other side of the United States.

I wanted to go. I decided to drive. I needed someone to go with me, and I settled on my little brother, who in 1975 was all of 16 years old. Old enough to drive, but barely.

This was before everyone had credit cards. I certainly didn’t have one. So my brother and I just gathered up all the cash we could scrape up. Maybe $900?

That was to pay for gas, food and lodging from Long Beach, California, to Baltimore (2,700 miles away) and then back again.

Seemed like plenty of cash.

It was not.

So, we took the Interstate 40 across the country, each of us going through a bunch of states we had never been in before. And being natives of arid Southern California, we often stopped at rivers and got out and took photos. Fresh water, flowing? What a concept.

We left at night, in August, because we didn’t want to push the Mustang through the height of the Mojave Desert heat. We drove through the day and stopped at Tumcumcari, New Mexico. The next day, we got to Abilene. Then to Fort Smith, where we paid $8 for a room. No, really. I think it might have been $10, normally, but the room we got had no TV and we got a discount.

Then to Washington D.C., where we paid real money to stay a few days at a Holiday Inn (maybe $70), then went up to Baltimore for the war-gamers convention, where we each lost in the first round of the competitions we entered.

Then up to Gettysburg, because we were military-history buffs, and we stayed there one night, next to the national cemetery (which we didn’t know we were next to till the following morning, when I looked out the back window and saw hundreds of headstones) … and by then we had an issue.

Back in Washington, we had noticed a loud engine knock. One of the lifters had gone bad. The car was still drive-able, but every time we pulled up to a stoplight, everyone would look over at the red Mustang that was making all that racket.

We had flogged the car, which was 11 years old, across the country, in the summer heat, and in the 1970s an 11-year-old car was old, indeed, and it was breaking down.

When we got to Gettysburg, we decided the car had to be fixed. We still had to drive across a continent in the other direction. It took all day to repair, and we toured the battlefield, and that was unforgettable, but the repairs to the car were something like $230. That was a lot of money, in 1975.

And, suddenly, our money situation was dire. Like, maybe $200 to get back across the country. We drove north into New York and slept in a rest stop. And you have not had a bad night’s sleep until you have slept inside a 1964 Mustang, with that console dividing the bucket seats in front and the narrow bench in back.

Up to Syracuse, across New York, over Niagara Falls. A night at a motel in London, Ontario. Back into the U.S. at Detroit, which even from the interstate looked sad and broken.

Down into Ohio, a right-hand turn onto the Interstate 70, and a stop at Richmond, Indiana, which a few years later I would learn was the hometown of a Gannett colleague of mine.

My brother and I checked our money situation, and it was sobering, and we decided we would drive all day and all night and see how far we got before we couldn’t get any further.

Luckily, gas in 1975 was about $1.40 a gallon, and we were living on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, which can be a staple only to guys under 25.

So, up at 10 or so, on the road to Indianapolis, also known for a very long (but much faster) bout of driving … and on and on. Into Illinois, not far from my father’s birth town in Jacksonville, across the Missouri/Mississippi at St. Louis, and I have a mental image of dark descending as we drove past the arch and Busch Stadium. I think the Cardinals were playing and the lights were on.

Out across Missouri and into Kansas and the wee hours of the night, and then it got tough.

Clearly, we were going to have to take turns behind the wheel of that old, stiff, massively unsafe car. (Did we have seat belts? Maybe not.) I have another memory of being in the passenger seat, not really sleeping, as my brother drove us across into Colorado, and realizing the whole of the eastern half of the state is a vast plain sloping up towards the Rockies. We got gas in Limon, Colorado, which seemed to us the first city of any significance since Kansas.

Without question, we both nodded off during that long night. While driving. But miraculously, neither of us crashed. We had the radio on, of course, though sometimes our AM radio would pick up only one or two stations, out there in the middle of nowhere. Of course, we were young and could go without sleep for quite a while.

We flogged the car on towards Denver. The sun was up, and it seemed to bring us around. At Denver, we made two decisions — to stop for a real breakfast, at an IHOP or Denny’s, and to remain on the 70 instead of taking the Interstate 25 south, through Taos and Santa Fe, and return on the 40. We didn’t want to go back west the way we had gone east.

We decided on the new (to us) route, which took us over one of the higher sections of the Rockies, and through the Eisenhower Tunnel — more than 11,000 feet above sea level. Which probably still is the highest altitude I have experienced while still touching the ground. It poured rain up there, as I recall. My brother was driving, is my other memory.

Down the back side of the Rockies, through Grand Junction (which would bulk large in a future hare-brain driving scheme which would fail), into eastern Utah, which is particularly empty, and by then we (the drivers) were running on fumes.

We reached the Interstate 15, turned south, made it to St. George, in the southwest corner of Nevada, checked in at about 4 or 5 p.m. — meaning we had driven something like 35 hours straight (take that, Le Mans guys), when adjusting for the changes in time zones.

We slept at least 10 hours. But we were fine, because we knew we would be able to reach Long Beach the next day, so no more hotels, and we had enough money for fuel and to get as many Quarter Pounders (our “dinners” pretty much the whole trip) as we could want.

Looking back, the whole of the trip was nutty. And it shows how much safer a place the country was perceived to be, 40 years ago, when rational, caring parents like ours would let a 21-year-old college kid take his 16-year-old kid brother and crisscross the country in 16 days, without a credit card or a phone or any of those modern conveniences even children have now.

And the maddest part of it was the 1,775 miles we drove from Richmond, Indiana, to St. George, Utah, nearly all of it on the I-70, and for far longer than professional drivers do at Le Mans and Dubai.

I knew there was a reason I liked the 24 Hours of Dubai. It just took me a minute to remember it.