My Social Network Road Trip

Leaving Portland I realized that for the first time on this trip, I was actually on a time schedule.  My friend Lindsay was flying into the Seattle airport to accompany me for a couple days and I was in charge of picking her up.  This time element carried with it a major shift in mood and I must say [...]

When I arrived in Portland I parked on the street my friends live on, or so I thought (I was only one off), and didn’t grace my driver’s seat again for 2 days.  Ignoring the fact that they both work in the morning, Sean, Kate and I walked around the corner for some dinner and drinks.  But as it [...]

I took the Golden Gate out of San Francisco and attempted to see the redwoods at Muir Woods.  I say attempted because I drove all the way there, passed 4 parking lots that were full and decided that the scenic drive (with steering wheel movements reminiscent of a bad ’80s arcade game in the rapid [...]

Jason was right, it was strange how quickly things changed from the LA commotion to farmland and desert.  A couple hours outside of San Francisco, the GPS beeped “Low Battery.”  I unplugged my phone charger from the car’s lighter and plugged the GPS cord back in, but the screen soon went black.  Assuming it needed to charge [...]

It would be normal to think that after a few weeks away, a person would miss their friends, co-workers or the routine of their happy lives.  Turns out, that’s not a problem for me. 

But I didn’t count on this.  I’ll admit it – I’m a nerd for NPR.  I stream NPR’s Morning Edition every day at [...]

I’m writing because your message is not getting across. When you honk at me as I’m passing by, my first thought isn’t that you’re excited to see a woman, it’s that something is wrong with my car. That perhaps being at an elevated height, you have noticed something that other drivers have not. Do I [...]

The terrain changed often on the drive from Tucson to Los Angeles.  There were hills, deserts and mountains full of rocks that could’ve been taken directly off a Disney set (I’m certain the clay colored giants only weighed 2 lbs and were actually styrofoam).  As I climbed to 4000 ft, I found out something that I [...]

As I drove through the rolling hills of Southwest Texas, I couldn’t help but find the landscape interesting.  Green freckles spotted the massive heaps, sometimes consisting of a single palm every so often.  They looked like a defective Chia pet.  It was as if I grew those hills with the best of intentions and then [...]

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I left Austin late but knew I’d be staying in a hotel that night so my arrival time didn’t matter.  I quickly realized that the I-10 I’d been cursing from New Orleans to Austin changed its colors and became [...]

The traffic in New Orleans added two hours onto my trip so I still had a couple hours to drive as the sun began setting over Texas.  When I crossed the state line into the lonestar state and started searching for a radio station, the first audible song was Conway Twitty’s “Hey Darlin.”  It couldn’t have been [...]