The Trip

My close friend Atuarre had to make an abrupt move from St. Louis across the country in order to care for his family in California. Flying in on Monday, he had to make all arrangements, pack, and leave by Thursday in order to make it back before the following Monday. I went along to help out and share the driving. Google Maps provided us with 3 routes, and we chose the most southerly, given that a massive ice storm had just blanketed Oklahoma and other parts of the Midwest. We also chose to avoid Las Vegas and the narrow mountain pass from Reno, given that we would be driving a truck pulling a car trailer. This route required over 2,000 miles of driving.

Rather than any kind of travelogue, which would be largely hampered by the conditions in which we drove (dark, fog, sleep deprivation) and the time pressure, I thought I would instead compile a few things we learned along the way.

Vital Stats

Total Mileage: 2,172
Tanks of Gas: maybe 7 or 8, over 11 gas stops, including top-offs at the beginning and end of the trip. We generally filled up at 1/4 tank.
Gallons of Gas: 175-200, depending on hazy recollection of average cost/gallon

Total Time: 57 hours
Driving Time: 44 hours
- Driving Time, by shift: 20/9/6/8/1 hours
- Driving Time, by person: 27/17 hours
- Driving Time, through ice fog with visibility under 100 meters: 6 hours
Average Speed: 49mph

Overnight Stays: 1 (although technically more like an ‘overlight’ stay, since it was just past dawn when we checked in and getting dark when we checked out)
Sit-down Meals: 4 (2 lunch, 1 dinner, 1 breakfast)

Number of States on Route: 6
Date of Road Atlas Used: 1995
Number of Roads That Didn’t Exist Back in 1995: 1 (a toll road extension that Google had us use)
Number of Towns in the Song “Route 66” Traversed: 8 (we turned off before San Bernadino and LA, and didn’t start from Chicago. No idea if Oklahoma City ‘looks oh so pretty’, as it was dark and covered with persistent ice fog.)
Coldest Stop: Flagstaff, Arizona

Number of Trucks Provided by U-Haul Before One Worked: 3
Number of Toll Route Stops: 4 (and they charge per axle, so the trailer cost double)
Number of Other Vehicles Passed: 2 or 3 (I had one, Atuarre may have managed 2)
Number of iPods Deployed: 3
Number of George Carlin Concerts Played: 12
Number of Fruit Confiscated: 7 (5 clementine oranges, 2 apples)

Lessons Learned

• For long driving sessions, comfort can be the enemy. A warm cab, soothing music, full stomach, and cruise control is a recipe for ending up in a ditch. Setting the thermostat slightly too low, playing Juno Reactor, and rationing the Pop Tarts helped keep the cocoon effect at bay. Fortunately, the truck came pre-equipped with a safety feature of No Cruise Control, which kept away that temptation.
• Driving a filled moving truck dragging a trailer with car requires almost constant correction. Every micro shift in steering wheel position would trigger a fishtail reaction from the trailer, requiring a further alteration. You keep both hands on the wheel, one mainly acting as a counterbalance to keep the other from making too large of a movement. With the trailer being almost as wide as the driving lane, you also had to keep checking its alignment to make sure it wasn’t drifting over either line. I managed by fixing a reference point on where the dashed line of the road came into the corner of the windshield (slightly below the bottom-right curvature in this case) when the trailer was in bounds, and correcting to that instead of constantly checking the mirrors. Checking the mirrors often allowed the truck to drift out of the lane as a result, in a sort of Heisenberg’s corollary. On top of that, the engine needed steady accelerator pressure to maintain a speed, and any incline required use of the overdrive just to keep from losing too much speed. However, you wanted to be cautious in engaging the overdrive in order to maintain some Downhill was naturally the reverse, with the added weight of the car trailer pushing the truck past its safe speed without judicious braking. Braking was roughly akin to what you practice in Gran Turismo - short, strong pulses on straightaways to avoid overheating and keeping the control surfaces free for turning. One consolation of all this is that because the minigame of keeping the truck moving in a line at a constant speed took so much attention, the sheer focus of will helped stave off highway hypnosis.

• No matter where you put your arm/leg/foot/hand, it will go numb or hurt eventually. I used my knit hat as a cushion on the inside door handle for my elbow. As may be common lore among the pre-Cruise Control set, at some point you simply lose all feeling in your right foot and will try driving with your left crossed over for awhile.

• Find anything to help pass the time. Activities that mark time can make it pass demonstrably slower, which is one downside of music: at 3 to 5 minutes per average song, it takes 15 songs to make it through a single hour. A last-minute inspiration had me filling one iPod with audiobooks, comedy routines, spoken word podcasts and lectures to fill in when regular shuffle play grew tiresome. In fact, we credit George Carlin’s early 70s standup with getting us through the veil of Oklahoma’s freezing night to stay ahead of the looming winter storm system, with additional kudos to Eddie Izzard, Jon Stewart, and Kevin Smith. Listening to speech and reacting (laughter, annoyance, interest) involves the brain more than music typically does, which can fall to the background. One risky remedy I employed to keep music viable was to guess at the identify of each track, then ruminate on its origin/influence, etc. - your travel partner needs to have an open mind to not throttle you for doing this, particularly when operating on little rest.

• Per above, a travel partner is a wise investment. Having someone else act as navigator, find something in the cab in the dark, manage the iPods, check GPS, watch for signs, dole out food/drinks, make conversation, and generally remind you that you’re not doing this alone while you focus on driving are all great assets. The first 20 hours of this trip seemed shorter than the 10 hours I’ve driven alone.

• Nutrition is important. Quick energy fixes like sugar come with the cost of a crash, and won’t sustain for very long. Fruits, granola bars, Gatorade, and Pop Tarts helped span the long stretches between meals without triggering a high/crash or instilling a food coma. When you stop to eat, your meal selection can be graded by its energy content over taste preference, although fortunately we were going to sleep anyway after those massive French toast. Incidentally, the touted “5 Hour Energy” drinks do work, to an extent. Essentially a massive infusion of B-complex vitamins (something like 2000+% RDA amounts) and amino acids, they do have an effect in a few minutes and provide a longer period of effective energy than sugar without the accompanying crash. However, the boost still wears off relatively soon (5 hours may be under optimal conditions), and may be better suited for beginning a day than trying to extend a long, tiring one. Also, they taste terrible (per Atuarre), so be sure you have a flavored chaser.

• Never drive through a desert, particularly in a truck during the day. The Mojave for example is a long series of slow climbs and slopes that strain the engine, and the background of unceasing nothingness burning with sunlight is a trial even on a mind not already burdened by marathon driving.

• Keeping track of time zones as you travel can be tricky. The truck clock was set to Eastern time, we left from Central, we stayed in Mountain, and arrived in Pacific. I kept track of elapsed/pending travel time based on the truck clock, but used my home time as canonical “San Dimas” time. This was most confusing when planning to stop somewhere in Pacific based on what the truck said was morning but was locally pre-dawn.

• Motel towns seem to have a distinct pecking order, ranging from right off the highway (budget chains like Motel 6), then slightly upmarket (Best Western). Often after a gap of empty land you reach a second tier of non-chain motels, usually a cluster of a Budget-or-similar-descriptor Inn, a (insert name of whistlestop town) Inn, and a theme inn with a non-sequitur and gaudy neon sign (e.g. in the middle of the desert you may find a Mermaid Inn). These can slightly creep you out if you reach them very early in the morning when no one is around, thanks David Fincher/David Lynch/Coen Brothers!

• Motels operate on an overnight schedule, and many have no night clerk in the late night/early morning to rent rooms. If you do find someone, particularly a night-shift wage slave at a discount chain, you will still not be able to get a room from morning to afternoon without being charged for two days because it crosses the noon checkout meridian. We found it beneficial to go up to the midmarket and find a manager behind the desk.

• California border patrol will take your fruit. They won’t warn you this is coming so you can finish your delectable clementines, nor will they care that hey, they’re California clementines, they came from here! As the little punched inspection notice tells you, agriculture is their #1 export and they won’t risk a fruit fly infestation just so you can keep 2 apples to stave off scurvy for the rest of your trip. Nor do they provide you any compensation, say vouchers for replacement fruit from a licensed California fruit stand. You give them your fruit if you want to continue. They have guns.

• Once you’ve reached the destination after a mind-numbing excursion, perhaps just the thing you need is some fresh air and exercise: say, by unloading the truck. After all, once the adrenaline finally wears off, the last thing you will want to do is drag your sore muscles out the next morning and face another Task. If you do it right away, it’s still part of the First Task and sometimes that seems easier to get out of the way.

• Gas stations are a fascinating microcosm of entrepreneurship and cost efficiency. Our U-Haul drop-off site was an unlabeled parking lot next to a gas station, identified by U-Haul by its legal name even though it carried only the sign for its franchise. Apart from the side business as truck return depot and their mainline in fuel distribution, the station also provided financial services via both an ATM, a wire transfer by phone for international transactions, and lottery tickets for those bad at probability. They sold hot food via mini-hot dog roller grills and a microwave, hot and cold drinks, and a variety of discount wines. They carried a subset of both grocery store and convenience store items - staples like milk, cereal, Windex and pornography - plus oddities like plastic-wrapped firewood, a full rack of bedroom slippers, and a counter display of lighters shaped like miniature revolvers. I imagine that the foot-by-foot determination of what products were sold and how they were arranged is the result of massive amounts of statistical data and trial studies over endless evolutionary cycles. And so at some point, optimizing algorithms suggested the sale of unlikely-aphrodisiac packets named Horny Goat Weed be sold next to powered flyswatters and vaguely-sexy air fresheners to the side of the fuzzy bedroom slippers, but behind the candy packed inside a battery-powered spinning kaleidoscope.

• Aforementioned gas stations are also, under analysis, marginally-advantageous strongholds in the event of zombie attack. They have a variety of food and general supplies, a ready selection of Molotov cocktails complete with revolver-lighter ignition, potable water and sanitation facilities, and maps to plan your next sortie. The large selection of random stuff plus flammable fuel supplies also provides for a MacGyver-esque self-destruct mechanism (cheap Hannah Montana alarm clock + talking flyswatter + spring from Harley Davidson sunvisor extender = ?) as you head out for one of the mainstays like a shopping mall or gun store, c. Dawn of the Dead.

• Don’t do this again.