Road Trip Across the US

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Once the decision was made to move all of my belongings in storage and in my parents' basement, I had to figure out how to get it all out to California. I looked at a few moving companies, but those ran anywhere from $1,600 to $4,000. I decided to rent a U-Haul for around $900 and did my best to recruit people to go with me. After a few days of trying it was pretty clear that I was going to be on my own. I almost got Lindsay to meet me near the halfway point in Oklahoma City (since she gets free flights from her mom, a Delta employee) but no one was able (or willing) to take the time off for the grueling trek.

I did the trip once before, driving from Bowling Green, KY, to Los Angeles with a former girlfriend. On that trip in early 2005, we got on I-40 in Nashville and didn't make an exit until that highway merged with another in California. We stopped in Shamrock, TX, on the first night and Las Vegas on the second night before rolling into LA after another half day of driving.

This would be a challenge because instead of a Honda Civic I was driving a 14 foot van. When I went to pick it up the night before I left I got another nice surprise - no CD player or tape deck. Listening to my own music (or books on tape as I had planned) was out of the question (the next morning I found that the cigarette lighter didn't work, so I couldn't even use my phone without draining the battery in a few hours). I packed up everything with a little room to spare and headed out around 7 am. My goal was to try to make it to each of the stopping points from my first trip since I would again hit I-40 and take it all of the way across.

Day 1

Fairly quickly into the trip I realized the challenge I was up against. After only a few hundred miles of driving I had to fill up the 30 gallon tank. That means I was getting 6-7 miles per gallon... with gas prices in the $3.40 range that means I was going to drop around $100 per fill up for the 2,100 mile trip, totaling around $1,000 extra. Yikes.

After a full 13 hour day of boring and uneventful AL, tip of TN, AK and OK, I made it to Oklahoma City and called it a night. I was a few hours behind my original timetable, but I also started further to the east. The van only made it up to 75 miles per hour, so I didn't have much of a choice unless I logged more hours. I still made time to do my Insanity workout that night to stretch my legs and get some restlessness out of my body.

Day 2

I got up the next morning and went through some significant changes in scenery over the next day. The plains of OK and TX quickly changed to the arid landscape of NM, with its red dirt, tumbleweeds and rock formations jutting out of the ground. Throughout the day I could see the remnants of Route 66 - it was sometimes used as an access road to the highway or local road as an alternate, but other times it was overgrown with lone standing old telephone poles. About halfway through the day I hit a brutal headwind of 30 mph with gusts even higher. I initially thought that the van was losing engine power since I dropped from 75 to 65 average mph, but the wind blew my door shut when I got out for gas.

I randomly stopped at one of the exact gas stations from my first trip. The only reason I remember is because a really large and tacky/creepy gift shop and Dairy Queen were attached. I got Lindsay a purple raccoon tail key chain to mark the occasion. After a round of snow flurries as I crossed into AZ, I kept climbing, climbing, finally calling it a night after 14 hours in Flagstaff at 7,000 elevation. There was about 6 inches of snow on the ground and the temperature had dropped to around freezing. I definitely wasn't dressed for that weather, so I went into the hotel, hit the Insanity DVDs again and went to bed.

Day 3

I got up early one last time, ready to knock out the last 8 hours of the drive. I hoped to get out of the snow and put my toes in the sand ASAP. It was mostly downhill after Flagstaff and without the detour into Las Vegas I had in the last trip, I powered into California. The temperature quickly rose as I entered the Inland Empire and after a SHORT 7 hour drive I made it "home."

My roommates helped me unpack and find room for most of my furniture. My roommate's girlfriend needed a table and chairs along with a coffee table, so I'm temporarily storing things there. Lindsay took my sofa and chair (I tried to sell them in Atlanta but had no luck). I'm slowly selling a few things off here and there (my road bike, for one) and finding room for the rest. It feels good to be living mono-coastal for the first time in a year, but I'm about to start traveling for work again. Le sigh.