PREFACE

I credit the movie Thelma & Louise for my initial attraction to road trips. It was the scene where the title characters are in some dusty little desert town and Susan Sarandon sells her earrings to a lone Mexican man that drew me in. The idea that there existed such a place in the country I lived in, where you could be the only person for miles around, where commerce and industry hadn't staked their claims and dug their holes, where somebody, even an outlaw could ride the back roads and duck below the radar of Big Brother absolutely fascinated me. I grew up on the East Coast, a place where it's nearly impossible to get lost and stay lost. It's a place where one town butts right up against the next and you don't have to drive more than ten miles in any direction to cross from one to the other. It was inconceivable to me that there were places in America so remote that you could drive for over fifty miles without ever passing through an incorporated town with a post office, police station or convenience store. It was inconceivable to me that there were places in America that, for all intents and purposes, weren't officially claimed or owned by anybody.

The year I turned 21, I crossed this country by car four times in two months. Each trip was different. The first was a four-day journey by myself from Los Angeles to Boston as I headed back for college graduation. A friend accompanied me on the second trip as we headed back out to L.A. over the course of a week and a half, hitting major cities like Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans along the way. On the third, I filmed a movie with some friends, shooting as we drove over the course of three weeks. The fourth trip was a three-day sprint back to Los Angeles with two of the crew members. On each trip I stuck mainly to the interstates, those asphalt bastions of fast safe passage, where you never have to drop below 65m.p.h. and where you're never more than twenty miles from the next rest stop with a nationally-recognized fast-food chain selling imitation hamburgers.

Those trips were all amazing and wonderful in their own rites and they introduced me, briefly, to an America I had never seen. Yet each one left me wanting more. In spite of having driven over 12,000 miles in sixty days, I still didn't feel as though I had seen the America of Thelma & Louise. I hadn't seen the America where old Mexican men sit on their porch, lone sentinels in a dusty forgotten town that has no name. I wondered if that America was one that only existed in the romance of road movies.

It was a man in New Orleans who told me what I had been doing wrong. He and some friends were traveling cross-country on their Harley's. "Forget the interstate," he told me. "Small roads are the way to go. That's where you'll see Smalltown, America, where people are the most real."

At that moment I made a commitment to do just that someday. As it turned out, someday would come just over a year later as I left Los Angeles behind me and moved back East. More than the excitement of a momentous change in my life was the excitement that I would get to drive across the country again. And this time, I would take small roads and "forget the interstate." Unfortunately, I was also on a time schedule. It wouldn't occur to me until three days into the trip that these two itineraries didn't go hand-in-hand. By Louisiana, I was fed up with "Smalltown, America" and the fact that I had to slow down to 35m.p.h. every time I entered into it. Once again, that scene from Thelma & Louise seemed nothing more than an elusive fairy tale.

When I met my wife Lauren, we also made an agreement to one day take a road trip. A real road trip. This time, I was determined to do it right. I had learned from my past mistakes. Not only would we take small roads, but we would give ourselves the time to enjoy them, the time to stop and look around without constantly checking our watches. Beyond that, there would be no set route or schedule. Sure there would be places we'd want to visit along the way, but we would figure the rest out as we went, riding with the vagabond wind and deciding our course on the spur of the moment.

After we got married, Lauren and I started making plans to take this trip as soon as she finished grad school. We pored over maps and guidebooks and planned our trip for May of 2004 when the weather would be nice, but tourist season would still be another month off. A baby girl named Allison changed those plans a bit. When we started trying in September of 2003, we expected it would take us a few attempts to get pregnant. Instead, on the first try our bodies decreed that our baby would be born smack dab in the middle of May. So our plans altered slightly… just slightly.

We decided to bump the trip up to mid-March. People said we were crazy for not calling it off altogether. They were sure Lauren was going to be miserable and that we'd end up turning back after less than a week. But as Lauren put it, "Either I'm sitting on my butt at home or I'm sitting on my butt in the car." We were both too excited to just let this go. The only thing I was required to stipulate to was that I was not allowed to complain, couldn't even sigh or roll my eyes whenever Lauren asked me to pull over so she could go to the bathroom.

And so it began on March 14, 2004, I got into a silver Mazda Protégé with my seven-months-pregnant wife and for the next four weeks had no itinerary, no commitments, no responsibilities, and only one goal: to seek out "Backroad, America", an America that so far had only existed in road movies like Thelma & Louise, to see if it truly existed, or if it was just a Hollywood-created fantasyland.

BEGIN THE JOURNEY