I didn’t know how high the sky was until I passed over the Rockies, I didn’t know how large the earth was until I got lost in the plains of Minnesota, I didn’t know how empty the sea was until I knelt in the sand on the Atlantic shore.
Fields of Minnesota 
No traffic in Montana 
Small town Montana 
Desert of South Dakota
After I finished a summer semester in UBC learning about the basics of journalism and anthropology, I embarked on an adventure that many would like to have, but few actually do. I rented a car for a month and drove solo from Vancouver to New York – and back. Though initially I thought it was to personally understand American car culture, Western capitalism, and to experience the Hollywood definition of ‘freedom’, I ended up finding myself through getting lost in nearly all 15 of the states that I passed through.
Vancouver and… 
New York.
Although I concluded my adventure across North America last summer, I never curried up the courage to write about it. Perhaps ‘courage’ isn’t the right word to use, but I had originally thought of releasing a new book on the adventure rather than just a measly article. It just seems that no amount of words would do justice to the experience – and the 200 hours of footage I recorded of myself driving along the open road.
Maybe I’ll review the footage and write about it at a later date, but for now, I’m writing a series of reflections on what I learned through the highs and lows of my travels. And sometimes, I’d experience both at the same time like when I spent months traveling across Germany in first class trains. This is also a perfect reference article for when I mention my ‘epic American roadtrip’ in some of the articles about the towns and cities I had the pleasure to visit.
13,000 km, where do I begin? Let’s start at the planning stage. I originally planned for the whole endeavor to be over in just 10,000 km (as is printed on the shirt I made for the trip), but it turned out that the detours I made to scenic spots along the way made me rack up an extra 3000 km. Just as well, the rental agreement said ‘unlimited km’ so I took it all the way.
On the first day, I was surprised with an upgrade from a modest full-size Hyundai to a full-luxury Cadillac XTS. A $100,000 luxury monster with all the options stretching out nearly 17 feet long was difficult to navigate with in the cities, but proved to be faithful on the highways. When I was younger, a Marcus would always joke to me that American cars are ‘powerless gas guzzlers’. I guess American cars have come a long way since we were kids in primary school.
Favorite restaurant – Sonic! 
Big car in small town 
Cars eat too!
I still remember the face of the US border officer at Washington’s Peace Arch crossing when I told him my final destination was New York by road in a rented Cadillac. He raised his eyebrows and exhaled through pursed lips like hearing that his son was going to get married to a stripper. I knew it took him great discipline to not shake his head in front of me, though I’m sure he told all his colleagues after work that day.
Yakima Canyon Road 
Foot of the Rockies 
Well into the Rockies
Interestingly, some of my relatives, and many of my friends gave me the same look, or expressed similar sentiments when I told them about this trip. Sure, they probably thought it was an ‘awesome’ thing to do, but most of them also used words like ‘reckless’, ‘crazy’, ‘be careful’, or ‘dangerous’ to describe what I was about to embark on.
Thousands of people do road trips across the US every year and a vast majority of them complete their journey with amazing stories to tell. But I suppose to anyone who’s never done it solo before is worried of the uncertainty and the loneliness of being out in the middle of nowhere with nobody to rely on. Uncertainty scares people, it scares me, and the only way to overcome it is to keep going through – not around.
Badlands 
Badlands
Marcus (another one), once told me that the one adjective he would use to describe me is ‘shameless’ It’s interesting to note that he almost used fearless, when he realized that I was actually scared of trying new things, I just wasn’t afraid of looking bad when things don’t work out the way I hoped they would.
Likewise, I had no idea what my road trip would be like before I set off; any number of events could have happened. I thought of getting stuck in Wisconsin with an overheated engine, getting arrested for excessive speeding and thrown in jail for a week, a sandstorm delaying my trip, or just fatigue from driving so much. The only plan I had was to get to New York and back within a month with no specific plan on which towns to pass through or which sights to stop by.
Whenever I’d feel tired I’d pull in to a motel and call it a day. A shower, a bite at a local drive-thru and a brief internet search of the road ahead. I planned about 12 hours in advance, beyond that I only knew which day I might reach which town. Whenever I asked for a couch to crash on at a friend’s place, I’d only be able to tell them the day I would arrive. If there’s nothing interesting along the way I might get there by lunch, if there’s heavy traffic it might be just after supper.
Only having a general outline of my schedule and not having a detailed plan allowed me to live in the moment and enjoy every scene in front of the windshield. It was like driving into a screensaver in perpetuity, it changes progressively from forest to mountain to plains and stays just as beautiful with every town passed.
I learned a lot from this trip, I understood American car culture a little more, appreciated their need for firearms when living out in the wild, and enjoyed delicious but diabetes-inducing food. But most of all I learned more about myself. Left alone in a soundproof car with no internet connection, I meditated on the drive and why I drove for so long while I had my favorite 70’s oldies album on. When I got tired of thinking, I just relaxed and let the view pass by at 100mph as a crossed the midwest.
My father always told me that driving long distances on straight highways was uninteresting and tiring. While I found the drive a grueling test of true grit and persistence, I also found it interesting. Sure, the view was uninteresting, but not having passengers mean I can reflect on the experiences of the day while I was in town and try to think of people’s lives from an emic point of view. It’s only running out of conversational topics with a passenger that makes a long drive unbearable – no passenger, no problem. Take the following example:
There was a really long line at the toll booth to get on the Chicago Skyway, so I took the time to find out exactly how much it cost to pass through the toll and gathered exact change from the center console.
“Man the line took so long I got you exact change!” I remarked as I pulled up to the toll booth operator.
“Yeah man, long night.” The African-American lady laughed. “You’re all set, have a good one!”
Though our conversation was no more than 20 words long and lasted fewer than 10 seconds, I felt an instant connection with someone through American friendliness. As a melting pot of culture, languages, and religion, perhaps the only universal gestures are our facial expressions and laughter. A smile and a friendly remark goes a long way when foreign languages can be so easily misunderstood.
During the drive on the Skyway, I thought about what it might be like on a mundane shift at the toll booth and how a friendly driver who shared her longing for freedom. Although our definitions of that ‘freedom’ were different, we shared a sense of understanding through being in the same situation. While I wanted to accelerate as soon as I passed through the toll booth, she probably wanted to go home and relax as soon as her busy peak-hour shift was over. We both waited to get to the end, but for different ends.
Driving that excruciating distance was also a test of my physical limits. The daily grind was about. I would wake up at 7am to eat breakfast and pack up, start driving at 7:30am and not reach the next intermediate stop until about 8pm or 9pm that evening. If we exclude the hours spent gawking at mountains in national parks or grabbing a bite after refueling, I’d say I drove a good 10 hours a day covering anywhere between 800 km to 1100 km.
But that’s not the most demanding part of the trip. Occasionally, I’d run into a motel demanding three-figure charges for a one-night stay and I’d be forced to drive the Caddy another hour or two down the road to the next town for cheaper rates increasing my driving time to 11 or 12 hours a day.
Yet more exhausting was a 26-hour period of time spanning over two days when I drove from Minneapolis to Toronto. After visiting Emily in Minneapolis, I left at 8am to drive down to Chicago for the Taste of Chicago festival. I spent the afternoon in the festival tasting some delicious deep dish pizza until closing and head out to find a motel.
I set off at 6pm and figured that with the festival going on that weekend none of the motels in the area in Illinois would have vacancies. Passing through the Skyway at about 7pm, I finally arrived in neighboring Indiana at 9pm only to find no vacancies in Gary or Michigan City. By the time I got to Battle Creek in Michigan it was already midnight.
Instead of staying at a motel, I paid an independently run gas station attendant $7 to use the shower for 15 minutes. I got changed in the car, bought myself a 44 ounce Slurpee for 99¢ to stay awake with intermittent brain-freezes, and set off on the 7-hour journey to Toronto through the dark of the night.
Having taken three hour-long naps along the way to stay awake on the roads, I finally arrived in Toronto at 9:54am, just in time for Sunday mass at 10:00am.
The test of endurance and adaptation to the situation could have been easily avoided if I had booked a room in advance that morning as I left Emily’s place. But as with all mistakes, there is a cost and a real need to deal with the situation. If I just moped around feeling bad for myself instead of soldiering on to find a solution to the situation, I would still be out of a place to stay and wouldn’t get anywhere. Even when I don’t plan, things don’t go according to plan. It was a hard-learned lesson and I always booked accommodation 12 hours in advance after that incident.
There were more than a dozen times in the trip when I thought the situation was so dangerous that my life was at risk, but that’s what it’s like on the road, isn’t it? Sure it was dangerous, reckless, needlessly long and difficult, as well as expensive. But I came back in one piece learning more about life, death, empathy, persistence, human nature, and everything in between in a month than I would in an entire year at school. If I had to choose, I’d do it all over again, but perhaps with a little more planning and a little more time.
New York was an easy 7-hour drive from Toronto. As my midpoint destination, it marked the success of half my trip having driven the same car from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I parked up on a beach on Staten Island near where Billy Joel grew up, walked up to the sea to feel the sand and water, then realized I had to drive the car all the way back to Vancouver.
On the way back, I didn’t know how small I was until I was surrounded by the bare valley slopes of Yakima River, I didn’t know how lost I was until I had to soldier on through a hailstorm in Yellowstone National Park, I didn’t know how weak I was until I almost ran out of fuel on US-14 in the middle of Wyoming.
