Inflation drives us to think ahead: plan out grocery trips, buy in bulk, carpool. One young man had an unorthodox way of funding his summer road-trip across America as gas got more expensive: he constructed a life-size pear on his moped.
Twenty-four-year-old Andrew Glubbey has 19,000 followers on his Instagram account, @glubbey. His profile has grown since the start of the road trip as he adventures in his self-built pear car from Florida to Washington State.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people that are like, ‘I could never do that or I would never do that with that kind of thing’,” Glubbey tells me. “I think, in that way, people are living vicariously through this trip by saying, ‘Hey, I would never do it myself, but damn, I really want to.’”
Glubbey comes from Merritt Island, Florida, and works as a sculptor. He makes sculptures from wood and metal, repurposing old scraps to create “something cool,” he says.
“I’m self-taught,” Glubbey explains. “I love messing around with power tools and screwing stuff together, and I think a lot of times it would be kind of just a joke, where I didn’t want to spend money on fixing my car, so I just screwed something onto it and called it good. From there, it just kind of evolved into turning my cars into sculptural art. It kind of happened pretty naturally, just something I got more and more interested in the more I pursued it.”
The pear road-trip idea was born when Glubbey sought to drive his party bus around the country from Florida to Seattle. When gas prices went up earlier this year, he needed a way to do so cheaper.
“I picked up this scooter in Houston, and I immediately knew what I was gonna build on it, because I’ve done the pears before,” Glubbey says. “They’re kind of chunky and fat, and they’re tall. I love the shape of a pear so much more than apples or oranges.” Glubbey thinks pears have more life and happiness to them, believing the fruit to be “underrepresented.”
The vehicle was originally powered by a moped, but was recently switched to a motorcycle. The pear stretches out wide as far as the wheelbase, and includes a door on the driver’s side. The pear is made entirely of wood, including the support, the internal structure and the stem. The wood was then wrapped in cut-up beer cans, which were laid flat and screwed to the outside of the structure.
Glubbey says the top speed of the pear on the moped was 35mph, but he hopes this will now increase with a 650cc Kawasaki as the base. The change came 19 days into the trip, when hindrances got him stuck in Missoula, Montana. Missoulians quickly reached out to Glubbey, offering their help for the good of the pear.
“It was raining for three days straight here; it didn’t ever let up,” Glubbey says. “This was when I was trying to buy a new bike, and I was taking the pear off the old scooter. I’m just getting soaked; everything I have got soaked, all my clothes. Besides that, I mean, Missoula has been awesome.”
Glubbey has been taken aback by the vastness of the country and the kindness of people throughout the United States.
“It’s not even that obvious if you’re only flying around, but if you take a road trip on a scooter across the nation, it’s just gigantic, it’s never-ending,” Glubbey says. “I think the more I travel, the more I realize how happy I am to be in this country, because it’s amazing. I really haven’t had very many bad encounters with people driving this pear around. It seems like every time I have an issue, people are willing to go out of their way to help me out.”
“It makes me very inspired and very happy to be alive in this country,” Glubbey says. “With everything that is going on nasty in the news, just to be able to look at this country for what it truly is, is inspiring.”
Glubbey plans to build a giant pear for rental next, a “Pear-B&B,” on a small lot in Mississippi. He also wants to “build something different every summer to take out.” While he acknowledges this summer to be a “pear-car summer”, he plans to keep it fresh in the seasons to come.
“Grab a tent, have a motorcycle and just take off and see what happens,” Glubbey says. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen sometimes, but I think the journey just gives me life, it’s what I live for.”
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