original text by Dave Gorman, executive summary by darmansjah
International car-rental companies operating coast to coast
include Alamo, Avis, Budget, Hertz and
National. A sample price for a budget car for four weeks, starting in San Diego
and finishing in New York,
is US$ 1,478. Expect to pay around US$ 2.25 per gallon of petrol.
I intended to drive from LA to NYC but in the end started
near San Diego and ended in Savannah, Georgia. The route wasn’t as simple as
that sounds – it went through 17 states and at least eight of them (Nevada,
Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri) wouldn’t be
touched if you drew a straight line from San Diego to Savannah.
The last time I’d gone to America, I’d been on tour with a
one-man show for four months. I mainly saw airports, theatres and radio
studios. It wasn’t a happy travel experience. My promoters pu me up in a
series of chain hotels that we were all
so alike that I’d wake up not knowing which city I was in. I felt like I’d been
to the states but that I hadn’t actually experienced it. So I decided to go
back and really explore. I bought a second-hand car in San Diego, a 1970 Ford
Torino Station wagon. It was a real piece of Americana that somehow heightened
the experience. When you’re driving through the Nevada desert in a car that
seems to belong there, life feels great.
America is so diverse. Driving across it, the landscape
changes so radically there’s no way of encapsulating it. On day one I travelled
from a modern metropolis, San Diego, to a desert town that plays the backdrop for
TV westerns. Out of that desert springs the tallest mountain in the contiguous
48 states-beautiful, snow-capped Mount Whitney. A few days later I was sleeping
in a tree house in a dense Oregon forest. In Idaho, I stayed in the belly of a
Beagle – a b&b called Dog Bark Park, literally buit in the image of a giant
beagle. It was beautiful and very strange. When I tell people about it they
always seem surprised. Then I show them a photo and they say,’ Oh my God! It really
looks like a beagle!’, which always leaves me wondering what they were
imagining before they saw the picture.
I’ve done a lot of travelling but most of the time it’s
about getting somewhere. This was different. I was doing this for myself: I wanted
to solve my own dysfunctional relationship with America.
I can’t think about the last day without shedding a tear. As
the wheels finally rolled up to the coast and knew the journey was complete,
the sense of achievement I felt was overwhelming. It makes me thingle still.
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