To See the Country, Road Trips Are the Only Way to Go
When you meet folks in their natural environment, it's easier to appreciate their differences.
I am not an enthusiastic air traveler. Bustling through airports, getting probed by security, and standing in lines leave me cold. But road trips are different. While the transit time is longer, opportunities to get off the beaten path make it worthwhile. I see places and interact with people and cultures that I otherwise tend to miss, rediscovering how far you can go and how much you can experience without leaving the United States.
So when my son said he wanted to tour the Kansas State University campus after receiving an admission offer, we threw our luggage and a case of bottled water in the car and hit the highway.
One attraction of traveling at the speed of a car is the transitions. Arizona's Meteor Crater, Two Guns, and Painted Desert give way to New Mexican pueblos, then farm towns. Midwestern wheat fields replace Western ranches. Mesas and red rocks become open plains where oil derricks and grain elevators are the only features rising above endless miles of flatness.
That flatness poses an unexpected challenge when you're accustomed to pulling into an arroyo for relief after hours of tossing empty water bottles into the back seat. When there's nothing to step behind, roadside privacy is elusive. Fortunately, our nation's truck drivers long ago solved that challenge: There is nothing you can't do if you don't mind doing it in public. Not that a rural Kansas roadside is all that public.
Eating on the road can also be a challenge. For basic sustenance, Anthony and I relied on Subway sandwich shops, which offer the same reliable fare at every location. While not exactly a sample of local cuisine, they didn't leave us regretting lunch when we returned to clocking miles.
We made time for more interesting meals, from the green chiles of New Mexico to the beef of Kansas. Salads were curiously difficult to come by in the college town of Manhattan, Kansas, although we had no complaints about the burgers and barbecue. The best breakfast we had was at Charlie's Spic and Span in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I ate entirely too much chorizo, eggs, and papitas, mopped up with a flour tortilla. Anthony's teenaged metabolism granted him leeway to devour a chile verde breakfast burrito the size of his head.
Las Vegas stood in for Calumet, Colorado, during the filming of the 1984 Cold War classic Red Dawn. The headquarters of the invading commie forces in that movie was an old Harvey hotel, the Castañeda, built in 1899 for railroad passengers. It has since been acquired and skillfully refurbished by the same outfit that restored La Posada in Winslow, Arizona.
Not all roadside refuges come with so much history, but they charm in other ways. In Springer, New Mexico, the owner of the Broken Arrow Motel lived off-site and left the door to our room unlocked so we could let ourselves in. When he stopped by later to hand over a largely ceremonial key, we ended up chatting about kids and college. It turned out his daughter is in Virginia, where she went to study biology and settled after getting married.
In Manhattan, the boutique Bluemont Hotel placed us across the street from the Kansas State University campus. Exploring Aggieville's college-centric bars, restaurants, and shops, walking the streets, and meeting people were as important as touring the school's impressive engineering facilities.
"I can definitely see myself here," Anthony told me after a day of viewing classrooms and sharing notes with other potential students. That made the trip right there. Well, that and the Red Dawn connection.
In contrast to airport excursions, which often feature friction and even confrontations, our trip was entirely pleasant. When you meet folks in their natural environment after hours of changing scenery, it's easier to remember just how big the world is and to appreciate that many of its inhabitants are perfectly happy living differently from the folks down the road. And there's no reason they shouldn't be.
As it turned out, the greatest source of stress was the frequent reminder that my son changes lanes like he's afraid of missing a sharp turn. Fortunately, that's a travel hassle that can be fixed.
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You haven’t seen America ‘til you’ve seen it from a train.
Passenger trains are an obsolete form of transportation, especially in the US with socialized/corporatized Amtrak and its deteriorating infrastructure and DMV-like customer experience. It’s like flying at 45 miles an hour because you’re stuck on the train and limited to the track. No extended stops, no detours. No thanks.
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First…What a wonderful trip with your son. That is great.
Second…You know what would be a great follow-up? Maybe more ‘tips & trick & hacks’ for road trips.
Third….Did KSU make the cut?
His son is going to college in Arizona. He had an article about the week or two ago. It was showing that homeschooled kids are able to make it into universities.
My wife and I road trip all the time. Tips & tricks? Here’s a few.
Avoid Interstates (unless you’re just trying to make time and don’t care about the scenery). Take U.S. highways and back roads. Stop in small towns that have local museums. Ask the little old lady who runs it (and it generally is a little old lady) the best place to get a meal.
Get an affinity app for one (or more) of the major hotel chains. when you’re trying to make time to your destination a couple of days away, you can wait until late in the day and reserve a room nearby down the road with no hassle.
Never eat at a chain restaurant if you can avoid it. If you have to, Subway is the best of a bad lot.
The navigation on your phone is generally better than the factory navigation in your car. Your phone nav gets updated more often.
Better still, leave your phone turned off in the glove compartment and get state-level road atlases, e.g., Delorme. The phone will tell you how to get from A to B as quickly as possible, but a paper map is much more likely to suggest the possibility of an interesting side trip. You’re not really traveling if you exclude the possibility of getting lost from time to time.
We only use navigation to get to a particular place, and plan out our general route in advance, with maps. All routes are subject to change on a whim.
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A road trip across the country is a great way to explain the value of federalism to someone who thinks we should be a democracy.
So the son explaining to Tuccille or do they have to bring someone else along?
Ah yes, those small country towns that don’t have elections.
Brandybuck 58 mins ago
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Ah yes, those small country towns that don’t have elections.
Damn, that went so far over your head that Joe Biden’s gonna have it shot down.
… a case of bottled water in the car
You did properly recycle all those bottles, right?
Flying sucks, unless you like strip searches and being herded.
The best breakfast we had was at Charlie’s Spic and Span in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I ate entirely too much chorizo, eggs, and papitas, mopped up with a flour tortilla.
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My 33 year old daughter and I recently made such a trip. She completed her contract as a travel RN in N California, and I met up with her in Vegas and we travelled the old Route 66; made a side trip to Grand Canyon in route. Amazing to see how the country changes from mountains, to desert, to the high plains, and then the Midwest over the course of days and sometimes hours. Great trip, and what better way to spend it than with one of your kids.
Watching the geography dramatically change in a matter of hours going from Vegas to New Mexico is one of the more startling experiences I’ve had.
Usually, I’m a bit critical of JD. Here, nice job, you should get out and do this far more often. There are far more people and a far larger variety of people than those cooped up in overcrowded places like New York, Chicago, and LA. Talk to people you meet, and you might learn something from them if you listen to what they are saying.
/This is coming from someone who has been to 49 states thus far.
The cars had arrived 111 years after a thirty-one-year-old doctor named Horatio Nelson Jackson and a twenty-two-year-old bicycle mechanic named Sewall K. Crocker completed the first cross-country drive in a “horseless carriage.” There were no interstates in those days. In fact, fewer than 150 miles of the country’s roads were even paved. Jackson had decided to embark on the journey in the spring of 1903 after accepting a fifty-dollar bet from friends in San Francisco that he couldn’t make it to New York in his cherry-red Winton touring car. He wanted to prove that the automobile, in the words of the narrator from the Ken Burns documentary Horatio’s Drive, “was more than a rich man’s toy, suitable only for short drives on city boulevards.”
Range anxiety was a concern for Jackson and other owners of the horseless carriage, as it would continue to be for many years. At one point on their trip, with the Winton stranded, Crocker had to bike twenty-six miles to get gasoline from the nearest town—and then walk back after one of the bike’s tires was punctured. The first drive-up gas station in the United States didn’t arrive until ten years after the men made their journey, and five years after the introduction of Henry Ford’s Model T.
On their transcontinental crossing, Jackson and Crocker had to drive through streams and over mountain roads that weren’t designed for cars. They moved boulders by hand, endured thirty-six hours without food after getting lost in Wyoming’s badlands, and got stuck in a swamp that buried the car up to its floorboards. The Winton survived a broken clutch, a clogged oil line, and a leaky gas tank, among a litany of other ailments. But at 4:30 A.M. on July 26, the two men, accompanied by a bull terrier they had collected along the way, drove up an empty Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in quiet triumph. The 4,500-mile road trip had taken sixty-three days and cost $8,000. But they got it done.
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I am a fan of Tuccille’s reporting… HOWEVER… Shelley Berman heard claims that flying is THE safest way to travel and wondered how much consideration they’d given to walking. I wonder how much consideration Tuccille gave to Chinese balloons (or Sirian saucers) that go around the world in 80 days.
Guess the lad is just too spicy, too chili
Hear, hear, J.D.!