{Author’s Note: Hey everyone. It’s been over 7 months since I got back from the road trip that this blog is about. I’ve done a lot of things (well, not that much) in that time, but putting fingers to keyboard about the trip has not really been one of them. And in that time, I’ve only lost about 200 followers from when my blog was in peak readership. I’m not sure why most of you haven’t given up on me, but I’m glad you haven’t. I’ve got about 10% of the book written, and I’m finally in a set writing schedule, so I swear (really) this time that these posts will come with some consistency. Finally, this is just a first draft. Some of it, maybe quite a bit of it, isn’t very good writing. However, I’m tired of making you - and me - wait, so here you go.}
When you tell someone you are going to drive across the country, in fact not just across the country, but across all 48 contiguous United States, the first question they often ask is, “What made you decide to do that?” I know this because when I told my friends and family that I was going to drive across the country the summer after I graduated from college, that is what was mostly asked. My response was usually something along the lines of “I don’t know. A lot of things.” And it was the result of a lot of things.
The earliest event I can trace my journey back to was Thanksgiving dinner of 2007. As my family sat in the dining room in our pajamas, after everyone had gotten seconds, I cleared my throat. I announced to the table that after spending 4 semesters in my university’s architecture program, I had finally realized that I was actually not very good at architecture, and I would be switching to a new major. That major was geography, not that I had a particular interest of the subject at the time, but because it was one of the only majors that would accept a student with a GPA as low as mine. My family was quite supportive of this, even though I didn’t have a clue in hell what I would do with a degree in geography. I just figured as long as I received a bachelor’s degree, life would work itself out.
Fast forward to August 2009 and I was eating barbecue in some no-name town located in the Texas Panhandle, a few hours before my best friend was due to marry his high school sweetheart. In between bites of delicious farm animals, I’d been introduced to a fellow named Ben, a friend of the groom and somewhat of a rolling stone from the stories being told. He had driven to the wedding in his newly purchased, but certainly not new, Chinook recreational vehicle. Like all free souls who have the opportunity to have a place of residence that sat on wheels, Ben moved around a lot. I remember thinking how romantic that sounded, being able to get out of bed and into the driver’s seat when you got tired of a place.
I probably enjoyed the notion because, if college hadn’t at least gotten tired of me, I was getting tired of college. I had just finished my fourth year pursuing a four-year degree, and by the time I received that overly expensive piece of paper, five years of my life had gone by. Considering the time spent acquiring a diploma I didn’t really want, it’s no stretch of the imagination to see that I wasn’t exactly jumping at the idea of entering the soul-sucking workforce as soon as I graduated either. So, as I headed into the home stretch of my college education, as my classmates went to job fairs, polished their resumes, and interviewed for the careers they would likely have until they retired, I coasted. When friends and family would ask what I was going to do after graduation, I shrugged and offered the not quite inspiring “I’ll figure it out.”
I conceived of the trip by way of epiphany in the first few days of 2010. A cross-country road trip did not seem like an unreasonable action for a graduate with a geography degree, I could justify it as a complement to my higher education! And it would delay the concern of getting a job, at least for a while. After I decided the trip was happening, it was a matter of working out the details. I reasoned that if I was going to drive across the US, I might as well see all 48 states, it would be a waste not to. A day per state made sense, meaning I would be able to experience a little bit of everywhere while keeping a constant forward momentum. Forty-eight days became forty-nine when, as I was mapping out my eventual route, I saw I would have to double back through upstate New York, adding an extra day. Forty-nine became an even fifty when I was unable to decide whether I wanted to stay in Los Angeles or San Francisco for my California day. I ended up choosing both.
The last obstacle I had to face before I embarked was telling my family that as soon as I graduated I was going to spend two months on the road, and somehow explain to them that this was actually not a dumb as shit idea. Surprisingly, when I did tell them, there wasn’t much in the way of resistance. The response went something along the lines of, “What? Why? Well, it’s your life.”
Although I was ready to begin my pilgrimage of pavement, I still had to deal with the situation that was already at hand, finishing my final semester of college. The wait was torturous. I sat in class and daydreamed of New York City, the Rocky Mountains, and all of the uncertainty that comes with temporarily becoming a drifter. This absentmindedness would have been perfectly acceptable, except for the fact that this was the last semester of college I would be able to afford, and I had to pass all of my four classes if I was actually to graduate, and a minor slip-up could result in no diploma and five years of my life down the drain. The looming of the road trip actually gave me a sort of cosmic peace in this regard, as I knew that, diploma or no diploma, soon I’d be driving away from it all.
After three high-stress final exams, I found out just twelve hours before graduation ceremonies began that I would indeed be a college graduate. I was so relieved that I called the registrar to notify them that I would pick my diploma up after the weekend, and in my final act of defiance in the face of collegiate expectations, slept through commencement.
I would have left the day after I graduated if I could have, but my younger brother was graduating from high school two weeks after I graduated from university, and I wasn’t looking to win any “Worst Brother of the Year” awards, so I moved back home and idled. Finally, on June 7, I packed my duffel bag, which carried the contents of what would be my life for the next two months, hugged and kissed my family goodbye, and started driving north-eastbound on I-30, towards the Arkansas state line.
