Road trip, USA

by Anis · Published July 6, 2011 · Updated January 30, 2014

Road trip- two of my favourite words, when put together. There’s nothing quite like dropping everything, grabbing a map and a friend or two and jumping into a car.

This might sound strange, but I felt kind of nostalgic during our US road trip. Which is weird, because I’d never been to the US before that. Maybe ‘nostalgic’ is the wrong word; whatever it is, it’s that warm, happy feeling I got from driving past small towns, from crossing over into another state and laughing at funny signboards.

This is real, there’s a town called Zzyzx on the way to Vegas

U-turn for Devil Dog, somewhere near the Grand Canyon

If we happened to be on the road, lunch or dinner would be at a diner in one of the towns along the way. Portions were huge so we usually ended up sharing.

But above all, there’s something really nice about driving in a country which (still) calculates its distances in miles. There’s something old-fashioned yet different about it.

A mile somehow has more character than a kilometre. It sounds more authentic to say that you drove thousands of miles across a large country. ‘Thousands of kilometres’ somehow just doesn’t do it for me.

I loved being told that it was 347 miles (thank you, TravelMath, you served us well) from Houston to New Orleans. I loved finding out at the end of everything that our drive from San Francisco to Washington DC through 14 states covered a total of 5,380 miles (8,658 kms).

The rest of the world can muddle along with its kilometres and kilogrammes. I find any country which tells me that it’s 50 miles to the next town, terribly attractive. So attractive that I would love to go again.