Solo Trip, Redux

A couple weeks ago I did something I haven’t done in a couple of decades: I took a long road trip in a car all by my lonesome. It was just me and the asphalt and the machine, putting in hundreds of miles in a single drive — some serious white line fever, to borrow a 20th century phrase.

I used to do this a lot back in my younger days, when I was a single lad with no responsibility to anyone but myself, and had just enough money and freedom to hit the road with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to get there. It was my Zen place, the highway – the one spot on earth I could feel completely alone. It gave me a chance to tune out the rest of the world, turn up the music, and think about everything in the world or nothing at all.

This was before marriage and family came along. After that, the solo road trips gave way to two-person trips, then three people, then four. We did many of these car journeys before the family moved overseas to London in early 2018 and stayed there for five-and-a-half years, without a car or any desire to drive.

We returned to the car trips when we moved back to the States in summer 2023, and I dearly love these trips. There are few things better than sharing a long journey with your loved ones.

But there weren’t any solo trips featuring just Dad and Machine — until a couple of weeks ago, when personal business and happenstance required me to haul about 640 miles, from northern New Jersey down south to Charlotte, North Carolina. I drove south in a single stretch, no overnight stops. Then I drove back up north in a single stretch, no overnight stops.

It was a brief redux of an experience I used to know very, very well.

*****

On this particular trip I drove our 2022 Nissan Altima — the first car we bought after returning to the USA. It has a handy GPS system that told me each leg of the trip would take about 9.5 hours. But I knew that wasn’t gonna happen. I used to make the same drive back when I lived in North Jersey the first time, 25 years ago, and the drive never took 9.5 hours. More like 10.5 hours, accounting for stops and whatnot.

GPS doesn’t account for all the things that can go wrong or wayward on a long drive, like car accidents and frequent piss breaks and mind-searing road construction, and more accidents and construction and accidents and construction.

So the drive down was about 10.5 hours, and the drive back up about 11 hours.

It was tiring at my age. But it still stirred some of the old juices.

First, the background:

I had to go to Charlotte for personal and professional business. We still own a house down there that we rent out, and I wanted to check on that. I had to make a couple deliveries for my wife’s side business. It also gave me a chance to see my father, who is a very youthful 91 years young, and my stepmother, who’s an equally youthful 81. An added bonus: I got to see old friends as well.

My wife couldn’t come along because of work. Our oldest daughter couldn’t come along because she was recovering from having wisdom teeth pulled. I asked our youngest daughter if she wanted to come along, but she declined, because the fall school term was drawing nigh, and she didn’t want to spend her last summer days holed up in a car for long stretches at a time.

So: Just me. And the Altima. And the promise of an open road, alone with my thoughts.

Which, honestly: I probably needed.

*****

I have always been drawn to the open road — or at least for as long as I’ve had the ability to drive a car. Even as a high school teenager I would borrow the family car and drive around for an hour or more, in the countryside, listening to the radio and enjoying the solitude.

These urges grew stronger as I got older and more independent. There were many times in my young adulthood when I would drive and drive and drive with no clear destination and no timetable. Sometimes the trips would take hours. Sometimes they’d take days — or weeks.

I’m not sure how to explain these road trip urges. If you have fallen prey to them, then you know what I’m talking about. If not, you may never understand.

Once, in the early 1990s, I hopped in my car at around 6 p.m. and decided to take a drive due west to Blowing Rock, a lovely little mountain town in North Carolina, only a couple hours away from my Charlotte apartment.

But then I decided, WTF, I’ll cut north. I ended up driving way up into Virginia, a few more hours up the highway. I cruised around and around and cruised around some more.

The next thing I know it’s after midnight, and I’m five hours or so from home. So I reversed course, and ended up parking the car in front of my Charlotte apartment at about 5 a.m.

That was about 11 hours of driving, overnight, under starry skies, with no real plan in place.

The next night I was with some friends in a bar. They had tried to get ahold of me the previous night, and since this was pre-cell phones, they had to leave a series of landline messages that went unanswered.

“Where were you last night?” one friend asked.

“I just went driving,” I said, “and kept on driving all the way to Virginia and back.”

One of my friends was confused.

“You mean you just went driving around all that time without knowing where you wanted to go?” she asked. “All night long?”

This was sort of astounding to her, that someone would drive and drive for hundreds of miles well into the wee hours with no clear plan or destination.

I told her: Sometimes it’s about the journey, not the destination.

She didn’t get it, not really.

But another friend did.

—–

I can’t remember the last time I drove such a long distance by myself before this latest haul to Charlotte. Maybe a quarter-century. Our family has made some seriously long drives – Charlotte to Boston (840 miles one way), Charlotte to St. Louis (720 miles), Charlotte to Orlando (530 miles) – but most of those trips involved stops along the way. And, of course, the car had multiple passengers.

My wife and I did a cross-country drive from Los Angeles to Connecticut back in 2003, over the winter holidays. We spent New Year’s Eve at a Motel 6 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, drinking splits of bubbly we probably bought at a 7-11.

I personally made the cross country drive on my own at least twice – once in 1987, and once in 2000.

The first trip was a bit of a lark. I had decided to drive from Charlotte to New Orleans for a little solo road trip, about 530 miles. I had just left a dead-end job, had a couple thousand bucks saved up, and decided to disappear for a couple weeks. The first night I stopped off in Memphis and stayed at a hotel somewhere downtown.

But the next morning, rather than cut south toward New Orleans, I just kept barreling west. Don’t ask me why. I’m still not sure why. I drove more than 720 miles in one shot to Amarillo, Texas, straight down Interstate 40 – the farthest west I had ever been in a car. I got there in the middle of the night and stayed at a cheap hotel off the interstate.

When I woke up that morning I saw something I had never seen before with my own eyes – miles and miles of flat, desert-like landscape, as far as the eye could see. And an endless blue sky that seemed to stretch forever and anon.

I may have blogged about this before, but that trip and those sights represented a kind of demarcation point in my life. They gave me a chance to open up a new can of possibilities that I probably knew existed but also probably had to see with my own eyes, at least once.

At the time, I was in my late 20s, without much of a career path or life plan. I was more than a little, how you say? — aimless. I had spent nearly my whole life living in the Carolinas (other than a short eight-month stretch in Birmingham, Alabama). I had no idea what I wanted to do, or even how to get out of the grind I found myself in.

That road trip out west in 1987 was just the tonic I needed. It gave me a chance to marinate in my own thoughts for hours and days and weeks. When I woke up in Amarillo, and saw the endless landscape, it dawned on me that there is a great big world out there for the taking. I was far enough west that I no longer felt the magnetic pull of home. I was free and clear of whatever I happened to be back in my hometown, and it was a magical feeling.

If I can give you one piece of advice, my friends, it’s this: If you ever get a chance, take a long, long drive by yourself sometime. Just you and the machine, on empty highways. The rejuvenation will do wonders for your soul.

Anyway….

I kept pushing west on that first cross-country drive – through New Mexico and into Arizona, then up to Las Vegas, where I called an uncle from a pay phone, said I’m in town, and crashed at his place for a couple of nights. The next stop was the San Francisco Bay area, where I called a high school friend and stayed at his place in Berkeley for a while. The furthest west I had ever been.

Well, I eventually turned around and headed back east toward North Carolina.

Though I did finally stop in New Orleans for a few days before driving home to Charlotte.

It was another dozen years before I finally left North Carolina to live in other parts of the country. In November 2000 I made another solo car tip from coast to coast – this one from New Jersey to Los Angeles, where I was moving from my employer’s New York City office to its LA headquarters.

It was not a new journey for me, so there was less magic than the first time. But there was one memorable stretch where I drove through a blinding snowstorm in the Arizona mountains and a few hours later drove through sunny, 90-degree heat in the California desert.

I’m no longer necessarily convinced of the greatness of America, given the current regime and its determination to turn our country into a fascist state that rewards corruption and ignorance over all else.

But if there is greatness in America, you’ll find it in the country’s endless and endlessly diverse geography.

*****

I’m a quarter-century older now since that November 2000 cross-continent drive, with a family and an aging body. What I have learned is that the long solo drives aren’t as easy as they used to be. I don’t have the same energy or carefree attitude.

But I keep myself in reasonably good shape mentally and physically, so I can still pull them off. For that I am thankful.

In a few years we will be empty nesters. Our daughters will move on to college and then lives of their own. My wife is a dozen years younger than me, and still in the sweet spot of a successful career. Her professional life could last until I’m bumping up against 80 years old.

I’ll keep working just as I do now – as a free-lance writer with my own hours and schedule.

What it all means is that there will come a time, in the not-so-distant future, when I’ll have a lot more time and opportunity for long solo road trips. We’ll maintain a home somewhere near New York City. We’ll also take back over our home in North Carolina and no longer rent it out.

I’ll make the drive often from Jersey to NC, 640ish miles of it, in a quest to split my and our time between both states.

How long will I be able to make the drives on my own? How old will be too old?

I guess I’ll find out. But from where I sit right now, I feel like there’s still plenty of gas in the old tank. I look forward to more solo road trips.

Life has its gifts. This is one of them.

Note: The grainy photo was taken in the early 2000s, somewhere in the desert (obviously), though I can’t remember if it was California or Nevada or Arizona or New Mexico. Wherever it was, it was taken during a long road trip down the empty desert highway. The car itself is my beloved 1996 Nissan Sentra, a soulful and resilient little car that put in more than 200,000 miles before the odometer stopped working. I bought it used, when it had about 50,000 miles, and drove it for about a decade before giving it to a niece in need of a car. I’d say I put about 180,000 miles on that car. We shared some memorable experiences, just me and the Nissan, and if you think you can’t love an inanimate object, I’m here to tell you otherwise. The image you see is an iPhone photo of a print photo, so a little fuzzy….