It’s the time of the year when my social media feeds are flooded with pictures of friends on tropical vacations. While I’m jealous that they’re on the beach while I watch snow melt, I prefer a different kind of travel. Road trips are much more appealing to me – I sometimes have even more fun getting to know the little towns and landscape along the way than I do at the final destination. Right now I don’t have much planned other than weekend day trips, so I’ll do the next best thing: read about them! Reading about the experiences other people have on road trip adventures always makes me so much more inspired for my next trip.
Cross Country: fifteen years and ninety thousand miles on the roads and interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, my wife, my mother-in law, two kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant by Robert Sullivan is a book that truly reads like a real-life road trip. Sullivan doesn’t dress anything up to be bigger or better than it was. He writes about the family arguments, the less-than-desirable hotels, the even less desirable rest stops, etc. He manages to weave historical stories within the personal account of his travels, something that makes this book that much more appealing to me. A big part of why I love road trips is learning about the history of each place and to imagine what happened before I arrived.
The mixture of history lessons plus travel and personal memoir makes this book a compelling read for anyone with an itch to travel. “From the bestselling author of “Rats,” a personal and national history of one of America’s favorite pastimes: driving across the country.
The cross-country trip is the trip that often whizzes past us on our way to quaint back roads and scenic parks; it’s an America of long, looping highways, strip malls, fast-food depots, and road rage, but also one that is wide-open, awe-inspiring, and heartwarmingly lonely. Here, Sullivan, who has driven cross-country more than two dozen times, recounts his family’s annual summer migration from Oregon to New York. His story of moving his family back and forth from the East Coast to the West Coast (and various other migrations), is replete with all the minor disasters, humor, and wonderful coincidences that characterize life on the road, not to mention life.” publisher
Interested in similar titles? Try these:
Ghost Rider: travels on the healing road by Neil Peart
The Kindness Diaries: one man’s quest to ignite goodwill and transform lives around the world by Leon Logothetis
Life is a Wheel: love, death, etc., and a bike ride across America by Bruce Weber
The Lost Continent: travels in small town America by Bill Bryson
