The Night Before

This trip has been a long time coming. Aaron and I began talking about this trip while we were still in college and began planning it in earnest in May. We chose Route 20 because it is the longest road in the United States (although it is not the longest continuous route because there is a slight break in Yellowstone. That honor belongs to Route 60.) It’s hard to explain what drew us to take this trip. Many of our destinations are not typical tourist destinations. It takes significant research and imagination to find things to do in places like Valentine, Nebraska and Douglas, Wyoming. Other destinations like Chicago and Yellowstone National Park receive throngs of visitors from around the world every year. Many of the places we will see, such as the Oregon Coast and the New York Finger Lakes, are places of charm and physical beauty, but we will also see depressed inner cities and fading small towns. Maybe the most interesting thing about this trip will be the opportunity to see a real cross section of America. The urban, the suburban, the rural, the very rural, the coasts, the plains, the mountains, the woods, the good, the bad, and, perhaps most exciting, the unexpected.
We will be traveling the length of Route 20, 3,365 miles over 15 days. We are trying to travel light: two rolling suitcases, a small duffel, a backpack, and a laptop bag. It would be pretty much impossible to pack a new outfit for every day in that amount of luggage. We’re hoping that we can either find a laundromat along the way or, like seasoned travelers, just make do with what we’ve got. We’re also bringing along a well worn road atlas. While GoogleMaps and all the rest are very good at giving you the fasted route between two points, they are not very good at helping you navigate a leisurely road trip. While we did print out many sets of directions to hotels and attractions off of Route 20, we will have to rely largely on maps and guess work to navigate our way.
Our flight leaves from Boston Logan Airport tomorrow at 6:30 AM. We’ll be flying to Seattle via Milwaukee. Although Seattle is not on Route 20, we were fortunate enough to have David, a friend from law school and native Seattleite, to give us the grand tour.
There is one thing about planning for any future event, be it a wedding or a trip or even a bar exam, that never fails to amaze me. Although you understand that time passes and you can tick away the days on a calendar, it always feels like a surprise when the day finally comes. The beginning of this trip is no different. Maybe the only reason that we’re staying up so late tonight is that we’re not yet entirely convinced that we’re leaving tomorrow. I’m sure it will feel very real when the alarm rings tomorrow.