Emma Straub, author of New York Times best-seller The Vacationers , reminisces about taking a road trip at the dawn of the iPhone age.
Manmade beach, miles from anywhere in western Nebraska.
Emma Straub
Lunch at Mom's, Salina, Utah.
Emma Straub
The summer between my first and second years of graduate school, my boyfriend and I bought a tent and two camping chairs and a case of bottled water and had a friend move in with our needy cats. After doing a test run of the tent in the living room, we loaded the car and drove west. It was 2007, the dawn of the iPhone age, and it was my job to juggle all the AAA maps and the new device on my lap, though it sort of didn't matter, because we had no destination.
Almost no destination — there was a concert my boyfriend had tickets for in Seattle, three weeks down the line. We were living in Madison, Wisc., half the country's length away. We were (are) both planners by nature, but it was Mike's dearest wish that we not book a single hotel/campsite/yurt before we left. And so we set out, toward the Pacific, giddy with possibility.
One of the only books I packed was Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood, and it became our bible. The Sterns led us to Mom's, in Salina, Utah, with "scones" that were more like funnel cake (that's a compliment) and Norma's Ocean Diner, in Seaside, Ore., where we ate fish and chips and pretended to be the Goonies. It makes me sad to realize how much of that I'd be doing on my phone if we redid the drive today — Yelping and Googling reviews and looking at menus on my tiny screen. The Sterns were our guiding lights, our compasses. Without them, we'd be sharing McDonald's French fries right off the highway, greasy and sad.
Have you ever read a guidebook to the country you live in? It's sort of wonderful. America is huge. America! Who ever thinks about their entire country at once, Florida and Washington state and Maine and New Mexico and South Dakota? Maybe it was living in Wisconsin that made us appreciate it all. We were already in the middle, in a beautiful place that none of our friends wanted to visit. We'd poked around the state a little and eaten our weight in frozen custard. My boyfriend got a job at a cheese shop. We'd assimilated! That's what we wanted to do on the road trip. We were going to swim in lakes with murky bottoms and brush our teeth in rivers.
Except we didn't. Growing up in New York City, I didn't get my driver's license until I was 20, and wide open spaces make me nervous. The woods make me really nervous. I like the idea of going to a beautiful national park, I like the idea of sleeping under the stars, but if I'm being truly honest with myself, I'm far more likely to drive several hours to see a building made out of corn (the Corn Palace, in Mitchell, S.D., turned out to be a regular building that just had giant ears of corn as decoration) than to park the car and go for a hike. I'd only packed flip-flops, after all. All the nature we encountered was accidental.
We swam in a man-made lake in the middle of Nebraska, our car parked on the sand, alongside everyone else's. We drove hours and hours to see Carhenge, which is just what it sounds like, old cars stuck in the ground, arranged like Stonehenge. Sunset at Carhenge is surely as magical as sunset on the days when the sun lines up with the buildings in Manhattan and everyone goes bonkers taking photos. When we got to St. George, Utah, it was over 100 degrees, and we stayed in a $39 hotel room. The whole town was staffed by blond 16-year-olds. We took photos every time we crossed into a new state, mostly with me posing next to the sign.