Road Trip

The Unparalleled Pleasure of the Meandering Drive (NO PAYWALL)

I met Julie one long-ago summer when we drove cross-country with a mutual friend. The reasons for the trip aren’t interesting—picking things up in one state, setting them down in another—but the drive itself changed my life: Julie and I would live together for two years, and then visit each other forever.

For unclear reasons (seeing as no one had a job), Julie was in a rush to get to California. We got lost a few times—inevitable back in the paper-map days—but still made it from Massachusetts to California faster than anyone has ever made it from Massachusetts to California. From one coast to the other, everything was funny. Falling in friend love is the strongest of drugs.

My driving skills were abysmal (and to this day have garnered no accolades), so I was quickly relegated to Permanent Passenger. I don’t think we ate food. I remember a lot of corn nuts. Instead of paying for hotels, we took turns sleeping in the backseat with Kayla, Julie’s Siberian Husky. I had my 19th birthday in Utah. We watched the hypnotic unfurling of corn fields, and in the Sonoran Desert, saw the sun rise liquid pink.

Years later

That was the first time I enjoyed a long drive. When I was a kid, my family road-tripped once or twice a year from Boston to New Jersey to see my grandparents, aunt, uncles, and cousins. I lived for those visits, but hated the interminable hours in the backseat. Someone always needed to pee immediately and my dad was always aggrieved that someone needed to pee immediately. I remember a lot of Howard Johnsons. I remember a lot of gas station bathroom keys, each tied to an unspeakably nasty plastic spoon.

Relocating every year or so in my 20s, I wound up traversing the country a number of times. I saw most of the states, at least their rest stops. I saw Old Faithful and Yellowstone and the Tetons and America’s largest shopping mall. I slept in many Motel 8s and in the back of a truck or two and once in a teepee. To this day, I feel an affinity for Subway, even though their “fresh-baked bread” is frozen bread thawing in an oven.

Texas is the best road-trip state, mostly thanks to its size, but for other reasons, too, including the legendary Buc-ee’s. Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas stations, each attached to a giant country store, but Texans reading that description would gasp at my blasphemous under-selling. According to Lone Star mythos, Buc-ee’s has the world’s cleanest bathrooms and the best pulled-pork sandwiches. If you road-trip in Texas, it’s the law: you eat and fuel up at Buc-ee’s.

Because it had been so hyped up to me, when I made my first-ever Buc-ee’s stop on a drive from Dallas to Austin, I was puzzled. I had expected…I don’t know what I’d expected. Perhaps to be Dorothy landing in Oz? I’ll admit it, though—the place is formidable. It’s the size of the White House. It has over 100 gas pumps. It sells everything from homemade fudge to God Bless The Farmer wall hangings to Buc-ee’s bathing suits to a Buc-ee’s-specific snack called Beaver Nuggets, which, I’m not going to lie, is crack. It’s always crowded, but the lines move quickly. The cashiers are cheerful. The bathrooms do sparkle. The operation is so well oiled, it’s like going through a car wash—you just shift into neutral and enjoy. Sure, there’s a hint of a Trump-rally vibe, but Buc-ee’s has grown on me. Now, like a real Texan, I see the sign and experience a dopamine rush.

Early Covid days with my dad and Buc-ee the Beaver

Last weekend, my boyfriend and I drove to San Antonio. Well, he drove. He and Julie recently bonded over their preference for me in the passenger seat. Had I been alone or with a fellow road-trip enthusiast, I might have opted for the scenic route, 281, and I definitely would have made a Buc-ee’s stop, but my boyfriend is more about the destination than the journey, so I-35 it was, and Buc-ee’s it was not.

These days, I like to do my travel writing around Texas, in part because (I don’t even want to think about it) I got sick on an international flight back in June. Puking every 10 minutes, dizzy in that obscene little sliver of a bathroom, I experienced something akin to the I’ll never drink again hangover resolve: No more planes. Ever. Of course, I’ve flown since, but reluctantly, so I was extra-happy to be on the road, my heels propped on the dash, my toes probably leaving prints on the windshield.

The Hill Country is pure charm—wineries, wildflowers, antique stores, the kinds of Texas small towns you see in movies. For culinary reasons (nothing against corn nuts, but age has made me bougie), we made two stops on Sunday en route back to Dallas, one in Boerne for pickles I discovered last year while writing a Hill Country travel guide, another in Comfort for sourdough pizza.

Blissed-out in the Hill Country

When we got home, I asked my boyfriend if he wanted to go on another drive soon, somewhere really far away. When he asked where, I gestured vaguely at planet Earth. I wanted to be in a car for a long, long time. He said he did not want to be in a car for a long, long time. But in November, Julie and I will return to our roots, this time in a rental—a work-trip-plus-road-trip from Savannah to Charleston. Whenever we reunite, we wind up sitting on a couch or lying in a bed talking, and now and then saying, “Maybe we should…[insert activity],” so there’s a sneak peak of our southern expedition.

On the road in central Mexico

These days, I have some old-lady driving habits, like keeping a tennis ball in the cup holder to work out knots in my back, but ever since my first magical cross-country adventure, I have loved nothing more than a road trip—the perfecting of the soundtrack, the sense of possibility in the early morning, those off-the-exit glimpses of our nation’s microcosms, the zipping-by of the dotted line. The American road trip is the height of romantic simplicity. I feel about it the way I feel drinking beers on a porch, when someone breaks out a guitar to play John Prine or Bob Dylan: Why would I ever do anything but this?

Route 66 in the Texas Panhandle

I keep remembering a road trip I took at 25, when I moved from California to Rhode Island. In California, I’d been lonely. That’s the trouble with moving all the time. Back then, I thought, Do I want to feel lonely or do I want to feel trapped? Or: Which is more important, freedom or community? The answer was lonely. The answer was freedom. I believed in those binaries. It would take me years to question my fundamentalist church of fresh starts.

Somehow, I’d packed my car perfectly: Everything I owned was with me, and yet, I could see out the back. As I pulled away from my apartment building, the place where I’d been lonely, the place I thought was responsible for my loneliness, I looked in the rearview mirror and felt the most incredible thrill. I thought I could leave a whole year, a whole place, a whole chunk of my life behind me. The finality felt so real, so clean.

I thought, This is how you drive away. And then that’s what I did.

Love,

Diana

P.S. Are you Team Car or Team plane? Let me know in the comments.

P.P.S. A prompt I give the students in my Food and Travel Writing class: Write about a trip gone wrong.