2010/2011 USA Road Trip Report

• This route was roughly 20k miles long, which felt to me like a lot of miles for one year until I realized that at ~20 miles each way I’ll do roughly 16k miles a year simply commuting to the office from my current residence in Sacramento. People drive far to go to work in this country. Time to find a home closer to the job.

• I was pulled over for speeding three times, and let off with a warning three times. I hit 120mph with the top down and a fully loaded car on the Bonneville salt flats, and it was me rather than the car that decided that that was plenty fast enough. I had the seats stolen out of the car twice, the roof slashed both times. Since I’ve stopped travelling, I’ve taken the time to disable the door locks so at least I hope they’ll leave the roof alone in the future.

• Places I stayed on the way, those denoted in bold I was at for at least a week:

  Santa Clara → San Diego → Los Angeles → Santa Clara → Lake Tahoe → Danger Cave → Boulder → Mitchell → Minneapolis → Chicago → Milwaukee → Chicago → Indianapolis → Chicago → Indianapolis → Asheville → Boone → Greenville → Atlanta → Savannah → Brunswick → Charleston → Atlanta → Charleston → Fort Lauderdale → West Palm Beach → Fort Myers → Saint Augustine → Cedar Island → Ocean City → Washington DC → Columbus → Detroit → Windsor → Litchfield → Oklahoma City → Santa Fe → Bluff → Salt Lake City → New Meadows → Seattle - Salt Lake City → Austin, NV → Sacramento
  *This list does not include the approximately 15 return trips back to California during the same period, and some side trips to Oregon, Texas, and the New England states.

• I lived with eight existing groups of friends or family, thirteen couchsurfers, three groups of random people I met on the street, five airbnb rentals, a week in a tent, a night in a treehouse, a night on a boat, and approximately two weeks worth of random motels and hotels. In the process I discovered that cases of beer and Kindles are the best things to leave as thank-you gifts.

• I discovered what the bare necessities are to get by in any sort of manageable way, and that they fit in approximately two carry-on bags. This includes camping equipment, enough fancy clothes to go to a wedding, and far too much computery junk for work. This doesn’t take into consideration the primary necessity which is people, which you can’t pack and tend to just find wherever you’re going anyway.

• Along the way I picked up two ridiculous habits from people I was staying with: cold showers and the half-assed paleo diet. Oh, and the dialect but not the accent of an Amurrkin.

• Getting Google Maps to cooperate long enough to draw this route took about three hours. WTF Google.