On July 9th, 2010, my girlfriend and I set out from New York City on a cross-country roadtrip. Our plan was simply to get as far west as we could, avoiding the Interstates at all costs. Twenty days and 8,000 miles later, we returned to New York City, having driven through 20 states in total….
From Tennessee, we continued driving into North Carolina, passing through the Great Smoky Mountains – and man were they smokin’ today: The Smokies are named for the fog that rises in early morning hours and after it rains, a result of warm humid air from the Gulf of Mexico cooling in the higher elevation. It…
We left New Orleans following the Great River Road north, which winds along the south side of the Mississippi. While we saw the occasional sugar cane field that once brought tremendous wealth to the state… …most of the horizon was dominated by impossibly ugly petrochemical plants. While brochures may call the route Plantation Alley, it’s…
We’d been hoping to explore San Antonio for the first half of the day, but the speeding ticket we got the previous night threw the whole schedule off. We ended up getting in really late, causing us to wake up really late, and had no choice but to head out toward New Orleans, which was…
It’s pretty amazing to be driving along seeing this out the window… …then taking a slight detour and finding yourself in a drastically different world: When we left Las Cruces, our goal was to make it to San Antonio by the end of the day. We had two routes to choose from: the southern route…
I had a lot of plans for Tucson, but unfortunately, pretty much all of them fell through due to lack of time. For one thing, I was really looking forward to visiting the Titan Missile Museum, where you can tour the only remaining Cold War-era Titan 2 missile launch site in the country. You get…
We spent the night in Kingman, Arizona (contracting a thankfully brief bout of food poisoning at the local Crack Barrel), then continued along Historic Route 66 the next morning. When people think Road Trip, the first highway that comes to mind is invariably Route 66, and for good reason. Since it was established as a…
Las Vegas wasn’t a stop on the roadtrip either of us were desperate to visit, but we really had no choice. There are only two or three highways that head south in Nevada, and all end up in Vegas, so it was a sensible place to spend the night. I’d post pictures, but they’re the…
I had three initial impressions after driving around downtown Salt Lake City: 1) it was very clean, 2) it was very quiet, and 3) there was construction everywhere. Seriously, every single turn brought us to another two or three buildings going up in the heart of downtown: Even old buildings were going through significant renovations:…
After leaving Blanding, Utah, we didn’t even have to travel to a national park to see our first arch of the day, which was right along the highway: Our goal was to travel north to Arches National Park, then rejoin old US-50 (renamed US-6 in Utah) and spend the night in Salt Lake City. Of…