How to Drive Cross-Country By Yourself
by Caryn Rose
Everyone should drive cross-country at least once in their life. Driving with a friend or a car full of people, it’s a life-changing experience. But by yourself, it is a moment of reckoning. Those hours and hours and hours behind the wheel with only yourself and your iPod playlist are as transformative as round-the-world travel.
The changing landscape, the weather, the horizon, the rolling hills, the flatness, the mountains, the clouds, the sky, the grass, the desert, truck stops, street lights, bad roadside attractions; with only yourself to filter these things through, they become more profound. I drove cross-country by myself twice, and to this day I still carry the very vivid images in my head. I have only ever thought “wow, that thing about the purple mountains majesty is true” when driving cross-country. I have never seen so many trains in my life.
You have hours to think. Hours and hours and hours. This can be good or bad, or both, often at the same time.
I have driven cross-country from Seattle to NYC three times, twice by myself (part 1 | part 2). I did this in 2003, which is almost another century in car travel given the advent of smartphones and mp3 players. While there are endless sites telling you what to see and what route to take and where to stop to see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, there are some basic tenets derived from experience that I believe apply to a successful cross-country car journey.
1) Don’t rely on your GPS or your smartphone. Get a map, learn to read it, study it.
Continue reading… (with photos!)
Thrilled to be a contributor to the “How-To” series coordinated by Molly Templeton! Be sure to visit the Tumblr and read all the amazing contributions.
