route 66

A while ago I wrote a blog post about Route 66, based on a road trip that I did with my brother three years ago. For the next series of blog posts, I’ll write about our experience doing this ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ trip.

When my brother asked me if I would be interested in doing a road trip with him from California to New York, it didn’t take me long to say yes. I had done long road trips in the US before, including some with my brother, but the thought of doing a coast-to-coast trip across the continent sounded intriguing, and I think it would be one of those that we would remember for the rest of our lives. We wanted it to be a good, lasting memory, so we tried to be planned accordingly to make the best use of our trip time.

The main reason for the trip was my brother’s relocation from Santa Monica, CA, to New York City. He had some belongings that couldn’t be easily transported coast-to-coast without paying significant shipping cost, so he thought it would be more cost effective to rent a car for one-way trip, load it up with his belongings, and drive it across the country. Given the long distance, he didn’t want to do it alone.

Since my brother was very busy with the logistics for getting things wrapped up in California before he officially moved for good, he asked me to plan out the trip. I always enjoyed the planning aspect of the trip, so I agreed to take on the task.

The first decision we needed to make was the route we would take for this road trip. The start and end points of the trip were fixed, and we also had a time constraint. My brother had just started with his new work position, so he didn’t have much vacation time that he could take. More over, he had to be back in New York City for an event. Altogether, we had about maximum 6 days time to complete the trip. Considering the distance and safe traveling time, we pretty much had to take one of the direct routes between the two end points without much detours.

Even with the constraints above, we still had decision to make in terms of the route to take. There were several possible routes we could take that would meet the travel time criterion. I used a book by Jamie Jensen called Road Trip USA that was quite helpful in providing overview of the major routes across the country. We decided to take one that is roughly tracing the famous ‘Mother Road,’ Route 66, and then finish out with a route that was pretty familiar to me in the Midwest / Mid-Atlantic area. For the Route 66 part, there were also several books I read to learn about places along the route to decide roughly where we would stop.

Beyond the route planning, we made rough arrangements to meet some people we knew who lived in the places that we passed during this trip. But other than that, we left everything else open as we wanted to keep the trip somewhat flexible.

We ended up going around 3,300 miles over 16 states in five days. The map below shows the route and the stops that we took along the way.

Two years ago, I had an opportunity to do one of those ‘once in a lifetime’ trips. My brother was moving from Santa Monica, CA, to Brooklyn, NY. He had some belongings that couldn’t easily be carried in a flight or shipped, so he thought of renting a car for one-way drive from West Coast to East Coast and asked if I would like to join him in this road trip. While I had been to many places between the two coasts of the United States, this trip sounded interesting simply because it’s going from one end to another in one trip. There were many routes that we considered, until finally we decided to take one that partly going through a legendary route, Route 66.

Route 66 was an old route connecting Chicago, IL, in the Midwest to Los Angeles, CA, in the West, back in the early days of automobiles before the Interstate Highway system was built. There were many little towns within the route that made their living from providing services to travelers. For many of the travelers, the journey in itself was the attraction as back then not many people traveled extensively from their homes. Today with the emphasis on efficiency and going to the destinations, most people would focus on getting to their destination in the shortest amount of time possible (thus, the invention of the Interstate Highway system which is intended to provide a high-speed route that connects major cities in the United States). This contrast between then and now was portrayed well in the Pixar animated movie Cars. The movie’s story, its characters, and even some of the places and landmarks were based on real-life places and characters that the Pixar crew met along the Route 66 when they did research prior to making the movie. Prior to our trip, I did some research on these locations, and made them part of our road trip’s route.

The result was a memorable experience of seeing places that otherwise we would’ve ignored or skipped. The photo below was taken in Arizona on the old road that was part of the original Route 66. Today the Interstate Highway cut through the area and made the distance shorter for those traveling east-west. At the same time, it pretty much ‘killed’ the original route that went through the mountains. Now you only find ghost towns and places selling memorabilias from the old days on this route. If you’re reading this post and are interested in doing the trip of your own, you can take a look at my photo album on flickr to give you some ideas on places to visit along the way. There is also a list of resources to plan for the trip at the end of the photo album.