Road Trip, Part I

This journal chronicles a cross-country road trip I undertook this past May and June, in the time I had between completing an M.S. and starting a new job. The trip fulfilled a long-held dream of a coast-to-coast journey along the I-90, one of the major east-west interstate highways in the U.S. The I-90 is special in this regard as it passes through some of the most spectacularly wild regions of the country, including the Black Hills of South Dakota and Yellowstone National Park, as well as many of my favourite cities, from Boston and New York in the East through Chicago – my hometown-away-from-home – in the Midwest across to Seattle on the Pacific coast.

As it happened though, the trip didn’t quite end with I-90. I have also harboured a desire to drive along the US-101, the Pacific Coast Highway which, as its name suggests, hugs the shore of the Pacific Ocean all the way from Washington to California. And since Seattle was already on my itinerary and I had several friends in the San Francisco area that I could count on to put me up for a few days, I added that leg to my road trip. (Time constraints forced me to save another planned detour that would have taken me to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon for a later date.)

While it is impossible to document every exciting, amusing, scary or thought-provoking incident through a four-week journey of this nature, I have attempted to capture some of the highlights to the best of my limited capability in the following.

The Preparation
Scheduling any road trip takes some amount of planning. This particular trip was even trickier as I had less than six weeks in which to fit the trip while setting aside some time for tying up the many loose ends that the transition to a new chapter in one’s life entails. Assuming an optimistic two weeks for said loose-end-tying, I was left with four weeks in which to fit a four-thousand-mile drive. I spent a lot of time agonising over whether that would be adequate, and if the experience would be worth the cost which, at first calculation, seemed to rival the U.S. budget deficit.

Egged on by a friend with a little more perspective and fortified by my future employer’s generous sign-on bonus I took the plunge and started thinking about the trip in earnest in late April. Routes had to be finalised, budgets constructed, rooms booked, campsites reserved, cars rented, flights purchased… Twenty, or even ten, years ago planning a vacation of this magnitude to any level of detail would have taken several months. With the power of the wondrous and ubiquitous Internet at my fingertips it took me three weeks.

The first order of business was deciding which direction to head first. I could start in Chicago, drive west to San Francisco, fly to New York and then drive back to Chicago. Or I could do the reverse. Or, I could fly to NY or SF first, drive all the way across to the other end and then fly back to Chicago. I chose the first option for two reasons. First, the two-car, one-flight option was cheaper. And second, spending a few days in San Francisco would break up the four-thousand-odd miles into two chunks, which I thought was a good idea given that I’d never driven farther than five hundred miles before. As it turned out, there was a third benefit. Driving westward throughout the trip gave me several extra daylight hours which were invaluable when I was trying to find my way around unfamiliar towns or navigate mountain roads.

The next step was to figure out where I was going and how long I was staying at each place. Most of the stops were automatic selections. I knew I wanted to spend a few days in Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park. I also had friends or family to visit in Sunnyside, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Bethlehem (near Philadelphia). However, many of these were several hundred miles apart, too far to drive in a single day. Given the duration of the trip, I figured a conservative driving time of about six hours a day. That gave me a range of roughly four hundred miles in which to get to wherever it was I was going. Based on this number, I chose overnight halts in places like Minneapolis, Sioux Falls, Missoula and North Bend to spread the driving between some stops over two days.

Budget was my next consideration. One-way car rentals are expensive, as are hotel rooms. I was minimising my lodging expense by staying with friends or in campgrounds wherever possible, but I still had to get a rough idea of how many nights of accommodation I would need. Other major categories in my estimate were food, gasoline and the one-way air ticket. I came up with what I thought was a very conservative budget of $4,000 of which more than half was the car rental cost for twenty-odd days. Despite the fact that I omitted to factor in miscellaneous expenses such as highway tolls, souvenirs and entry fees to various attractions en route, I managed to come in only $500 in the red thanks to generous overbudgeting for food and gas.

The last piece of the puzzle was equipment. I had been acquiring all the paraphernalia for trip like this over several months – tent, sleeping bag, flashlight, waterproof jacket, hiking boots, camping stove, compass, binoculars etc. My final purchase, a Jansport^® backpack, was delivered about a week before my trip and I was all set.

Making the reservations, getting driving directions and informing friends along the way approximately when to expect me was all done in between preparing my thesis and house-hunting, and I admit I probably spent just as much time planning my vacation as I did on those other items which some might consider more important!