January 2006 - Article 3

     Now we were on the road, heading away from home. After a couple of quick backtracks to retrieve last minute items such as a compass and flashlight, that was the end of home. The first moments we drove, I didn't feel as though we were actually leaving for an entire month, crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We'd left our house lots of times with tons of gear to go for weekend trips or sojourns to Florida to visit relatives. I had to keep reminding myself that we weren't on one of those trips. We were going further than I ever had before, certainly further than we had been together.

     The basic itinerary was to go to the West Coast via San Diego, drive up the coast to north of Seattle to meet up with some friends, swing through Yellowstone on the way back, and then generally head back from there. We had one month to do this exactly: we headed out on May fifth, and had to be back by June fifth. Work and bills had been taken care of until that point, but after that, it was back to the real world. Until then, we had as much road we wanted at our disposal, and the Pacific Ocean waiting for us to meet her.

     Up until this point, I'd never been further west than Tennessee, and my husband had flown out to the West Coast earlier in his life, but neither one of us had seen the land in between the Mississippi River and the Pacific. And it had been so long that we had been to those respective places that we didn't really even remember that. In a way the whole experience would be new, exactly what we wanted.

     We'd be making our way via the interstates, visiting as many national parks as we could along the way. I've heard many people disparage the interstate system, citing reasons such as the disintegration of small towns and lack of scenery. I generally didn't mind the back roads, but for our purposes, the interstate would suit us just fine. Get ourselves to as many places as possible in the shortest amount of time.

     Case in point: getting off of Long Island was always a job in itself. You could take state roads to the bridges connecting you to the mainland, in theory and in actuality. But the traffic wasn't that much lighter. And the constant starting and stopping at traffic lights, slamming on the brakes as someone pulled out in front of you or at a store, and lower speed in general was more an exercise in futility rather than a nice trip in the slow lane. Even with the morning rush hour, you'd probably be better off on one of the highways.

     This argument held it logic, even after leaving the bottlenecks. Highways are always more expedient when you go to an unfamiliar area. If I was just going on a ramble the way John Steinbeck did in "Travels with Charley", then getting lost in the middle of Nebraska wouldn't be such a bad idea. But with the smell of sea salt tempting my nose and a quick deadline to be back home, it didn't seem like the best idea. Better to jump on the highway to get where you wanted to go.

     To defend the highway further, I've never exactly considered it to be particularly devoid of scenery. On Long Island, it was usually the best chance you'd get of driving past any trees. Otherwise, you were treated to a delight of strip mall after strip mall. I didn't find that particularly attractive. Driving down to Florida on numerous occasions to visit relatives, it seemed the strip of forestry that paralleled the interstates created a buffer between you and civilization. When the road was particularly empty, you could pretend that you were the only person in the world cruising down the asphalt, all of it to yourself.

     That empty road would come in time. For now, we were on the Long Island Expressway, heading west. Officially, rush hour was over, but on Long Island, rush hour is never really over when you bordered the city that never slept. So for now, the open road would have to wait. But at least the road we were on was the fastest way to get there.