Cross-Country Driving on 1999

Woody Guthrie

Thursday, August 12

I was born within spitting distance of New York City. I lived underneath the Benjamin Franklin Bridge for a couple of years - on the Camden side of course, but I jogged to Philadelphia. And I lived everywhere in between that 100 mile span. A couple of years ago Jessica and I finally succeeded in moving out of Jersey; and though we only moved less than 250 miles away to the Northeast, it does feel like we left behind another world. But if 250 miles feels like a world away, what will 5,000 miles feel like, all in a two-week time frame?

The Euchner family summer vacations, year after year, rarely drifted from the mold of DRIVE DUE SOUTH. As if 12 hour car rides with my parents and sister and I fighting the whole time was not bad enough, my father never drove faster than 60 miles per hour. One time we went to Canada for a week and another time we drove up to Maine, but basically we just drove to Florida, or South Carolina, or North Carolina, and either went to some beach or to DisneyWorld. I don't remember ever enjoying a vacation. After the last Euchner trip of which I was a part, I didn't take another real vacation until last year's honeymoon in Aruba.

My opposition to those long drives had little to do with the road itself (it was a painfully boring drive, just going in a straight line through a 600 mile swamp) but I was not in any position to enjoy it. I had no control over where we were going, what we were doing, where we were staying. And just like family vacations for every other family in the universe, it always turned into a Battle Royale within fifteen minutes of leaving home, and the brawl continued until fifteen minutes before arriving back home.

I was always bored with the monotony of our vacations as well. We never left the east coast a single time. I had never even crossed into Vermont, even though it was less than five hours from my parents' house, until after I moved to Massachusetts. I never criticize my parents for not taking me to Europe or anything like that, because they're not zillionaires and the family brawling probably would be no different in Vienna than in Virginia. But DisneyWorld takes you to the cleaners just as badly as airfare for four to Pago Pago. And besides that, going to DisneyWorld funds the festering evil that is seeping into our world's fabric. (Not ready to go down that road on this page, but Disney is evil. Trust me, I'm in the know on this one.)

Shortly after that last family vacation I got my drivers license, and from that moment I instantly became obsessed with driving on every single road that has ever been paved (as well as many of those have not been paved). Since I got my own car, I've averaged well over 20,000 miles of driving per year, and very little of that mileage is used for work since I usually take public transportation into Boston. Some of the better road trips Jessica and I have taken in recent months are an 800 mile trek through Vermont up to the Canada border and then winding through the county roads in the Adirondacks, and a 1,000 mile jaunt from Boston to Montreal to Quebec and home through the backwoods of Maine (both were two-day trips).

If we had two months we could do this trip properly - start in the northeast and hit the four corners of the continental 48 states. But I only get two weeks off from my job so the trip can only last 14 days. Not enough to see everything in the nation, but plenty of time for guerrilla vacationing.

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