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The most painful impact the recent upswing in the price of gas has had for me is the impossibility of taking road trips. Because the cost of filling up our tanks is starting to match up a little more closely with all the other gas-pumping countries in the world, jumping in the car and driving all over hell and gone for no reason whatsoever isn’t the feasible plan it once was.

Road trips used to be the practically free vacation option for college students (and anyone else who didn’t mind sleeping in the car or at a skeezy motel). The current price of dead dinosaur juice is severely limiting my road tripping, solo and with my kiddos. I have an entire collection of exquisite road trip memories.

When I was a kid, my Dad took my brother and me on several perfect road trips. I clocked my first unsupervised driving time in my Dad’s ancient Ford truck on a straight-ass road that went for miles through the desert while my Dad took a nap in the passenger seat and my little brother tried in vain to convince me it was a good idea to let him steer. The closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience was the sunrise I saw over a cornfield in Kansas one summer morning.

When I was in college I made good use of my Japanese four-door sedan and would ditch my friends and housemates regularly for solo road trips. I wasn’t entirely alone—I’d bring along my Mom’s dog for protection, my Dad’s old 35mm camera that he picked up in Vietnam and I was fortunate to be gifted with, and an assload of black-and-white film. I drove all over California, shot rolls and rolls of decrepit architecture, ate whatever they were selling at roadside fruit stands and convenience stores, drank stupid amounts of coffee, and slept in my car at rest stops or pulled over on quiet farm roads*.

Interlaced among all those road trip memories is not even one whisper of a thought about filling the gas tank. I totally took it for granted that I could just drive away for several days and meander all over the state or the country. I’ve driven back and forth across the United States three times, including a six-week road trip I took for college credit during my senior year at The Evergreen State College.

That trip involved driving from Seattle to California, from California to the Deep South, driving up and down the Mississippi River and throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, back to California and then back up to Seattle. The most expensive part of the trip was paying to sleep in motels when I wasn’t staying with friends. (I had matured enough to realize that sweet young things sleeping at rest stops was beyond the limits of asininity).

Until recently, I had assumed those trips were just the beginning of my cross-country road trip collection. Now it makes me slightly nauseated to think of how much it would cost to drive to the East Coast and back again.

The newly published book, Twenty West: The Great Road Across America by Mac Nelson, comes at a good time then—I can read about driving Route 20 and have a vicarious road trip thrill. Not as exquisite as a real road trip, but a hell of a lot cheaper. U.S. Route 20 extends from Boston, Mass. to Newport, Oregon and would make an amazing trip. I had always planned that someday (in the far distant future) I would take each of my kids on their own road trip the summer prior to their sixteenth birthdays, so they could learn to drive out on a deserted highway for a week, away from the city. I have ten years to start saving for a Route 20 road trip with my oldest…

Further Reading:

History of U.S. Route 20
ForeWord Magazine Book Review
Mac Nelson Book Signing at Talking Leaves Books
Road Trip: Route 20—Coast to Coast!

*I realize, now that I’m an adult with two children, that sleeping at rest stops was dangerous and I’m very, very lucky nothing horrible ever befell me.

Posted by Alexa Harrington