When I was in my mid-20s, my then-boyfriend and I decided to pack up our few belongings and hit the road: California or bust. I grew up in Maryland, and California always held a mystique to me. It represented this far-away fantasyland where surfers rode endlessly into blazing sunsets, artichokes and olives grew plump and rampant, and giant trees with rich, red wood scraped the lower corners of the sky. We were going to drive there, and we gave ourselves two timeless weeks for the journey.
I have never felt quite so free in all my life, so blissfully un-rooted, as that trip felt to me. Each day, we’d drive as long as we wanted to, then we’d pick a town (sometimes for its name, sometimes for its location, sometimes for absolutely no reason at all), find a campground, and put in stakes for the night. At dawn, we’d wake up and do it all over again, and it was this way I got to see the fierce, quiet calm of a Kansas sunrise, and the outlandish cacophony of colors that signals sunset in the San Juans.
We went in October, when the leaves were changing. The squirrels and chipmunks were busy gathering their nuts for the winter, and the deer seemed to be lapping up the sunshine’s last warmth along with their morning mist. We stayed in steel-mining towns, corn-fed capitals, barn-rich ‘burbs, and amid vast stretches of soothing nothingness. We ate in diners and hole-in-the-wall restaurants, in the car and at picnic tables in picturesque places that seemed to have no name. Our trip slowed down as we hit the mountains and we hopped parks; one night in Mesa Verde, the next in Arches, the next passing through Bryce to hit the silver-tinged rock faces of Zion.
Around three weeks after we started we entered California, off our schedule, if not off the map. Our first order of business was to stop at a farm-stand and revel in all that fresh Central Valley produce, from grapes and peaches to olives stuffed with the biggest fattest most sweet (yes, sweet!) garlic cloves I’d ever tasted.
We'd arrived at the end of the road, and I had such a sense of how this country flows from one side to the other, such a sense of continuity among all the people that lie between. It was an ultimate trip and a rite of passage, and something I’d love to do again--soon.
Have you ever driven cross-country? What’s your favorite U.S. road trip?
Comments
Feb 16, 2009
I did the ultimate road trip to California last year and I'm still reveling in the experience. On the way out we took the Southern route -- hitting up BBQ joints and country bars in Nashville, taking in the breathtaking view of the snow-covered Grand Canyon and making a pit-stop in the UFO-obsessed Roswell. On the way home we went north through Yellowstone, got a flat tire in ND (upon where the guys who patched us up sang us a little ditty to cheer us up), and traversed the Mackinaw Bridge. Every time I hear John Mellancamp's "Crazy Island" I smile. Like you, I can't wait to do it again some day.
Feb 17, 2009
Your trip sounds amazing! I've never driven cross-country, but it's tops on my travel wish list. I can't say my U.S. highway outings have been too majestic--although I love it, the Eastern Seaboard doesn't hold quite as much mystique as those dusty interior roads.