Category: On the Road

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What Have We Done Lately? Across the U.S. in 2.5 Days

We live in a big country.

And yet, in some ways, not so big.

I’ve been treated to both perspectives in the past year, most recently in late March when I drove from San Diego, Calif., to Easthampton, Mass., in two and a half days.

Bike on Long Beach, CA
July 7, 2021, Long Beach, CA, after riding from Easthampton, MA

This was at least my sixth time driving across the entire U.S., and I can’t count how many times I’ve driven partially across. But I’ve never made the trip in such a compacted time frame, and wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. Before this drive, the last time I traversed the country was via bicycle, in summer 2021.

Across the United States by bicycle: 68 days. Big country.

Across the United States by car: 2 ½ days. Maybe not so big.

There was something beautiful and fluid and thorough in this exercise of sprinting from coast to coast by car in a truncated period. It allowed for a nearly uninterrupted portrait of the country – of the narrow strip through which I traveled anyway. From the Pacific’s glow to the desert’s aridity, the spectacular mountains bifurcating the middle, the interminable flatness of the vast Midwest, and finally the infinite trees and rolling hills of the eastern states.

This quick trip also allowed for a survey of radio stations across the land, from the Mexican music of the southwest near the border to the broad selection of country music, endless religious proselytizing across the Midwest, rock, bluegrass, pop, hip hop, talk, and a small dose of classical and jazz, in that order.

Across the Mojave Again

This drive was a functional traverse. It followed a wonderful three-day excursion with my daughter, Livvy, from Phoenix to San Diego in her Honda Fit, which she has appropriately named Buttercup. The plan was to get her to San Diego, from where she would work her way to the terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail to begin a five-month thru-hike. I was to then drive her car back to Massachusetts for safekeeping while she hikes.

Livvy and me in the middle of the Mojave (Buttercup in the background).

Our three-day drive took us across the Mojave Desert, along the same route I happened to bike last summer.

This was a surreal experience for me. When I biked last summer, from Parker, Arizona, to Twentynine Palms, California, a 111-mile stretch through unforgivingly hot, exposed terrain, it was a daylong ordeal through the 107-degree heat of July. It stands out as one of the most intense days of riding – of my life! – I’ve ever had.

Driving along the same route with Livvy took less than two hours, in an air-conditioned capsule with windows closed and a podcast piped over the speakers. Crossing the desert in a car gives no hint to what it’s like on bike. Crossing the country in a car is equally as distinct from a coast-to-coast traverse by bicycle.

Alien Encounter?

Traveling with my daughter was a true joy that went by far too fast. Our senses of humor are ridiculously in sync and we laughed our way through California.

Except, we weren’t laughing on our second night, when we camped out on Bureau of Land Management land outside Joshua Tree and were buzzed by either A) a highly experimental, but human-made, flying device that looked and sounded like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard; or B) an alien ship. Read the story here.

Still flummoxed but seemingly undisturbed the next morning, we drove three hours to San Diego and stayed in Ocean Beach, where I lived as a younger iteration in the late 1980s.

Driving Through the Night

To drive coast to coast across the United States in 2 ½ days, you’ll need to put in some long stretches.

I set out from San Diego on March 18 at 10:15 a.m. and drove through the day, passing through Albuquerque at 11:30 p.m., then through the night up into Texas, across the Oklahoma panhandle and into Kansas on a small, deserted highway. In Kansas, I spotted a pullover picnic area at 5:30 a.m. and stopped in for a snooze. One hour later, the sun blazed on me through the windshield and the snooze was over.

I took the wheel again and headed east through the day. By the time I stopped for a needed overnight and a bed, outside St. Louis, I had driven nearly 30 hours interrupted only by the one-hour nap in Kansas.

I should mention, my energy was fueled by a succession of convenience store coffee. I’m not a coffee drinker, so when I drink that caffeine-injected liquid, it jolts me for many hours. Cheap date.

Fortified after a solid hotel sleep, I headed for home at 8 a.m. on March 20, arriving in Easthampton, Mass., at close to 2 a.m. the morning of March 21, a 15-hour drive.

Waiting to Move

Thankfully, I love to drive. Give me open road and a tank full of gas and I’m gone. Add in coffee and decent tunes and I’m good for hours on end, even days.

But it’s more accurate to say, I love moving. The mode of transportation is secondary. Bike, car, walking, paddling. Give me constantly changing scenery, the sensation of locomotion and the notion of covering ground and I’m happy.

That’s how I arrived back home following my whirlwind excursion to California with my daughter. Happy. To have moved, to have spent time on the adventure road again.

The time in between is simply waiting for the next chance to head out and move.

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An Alien Encounter in the Desert? Or…?

I wish I had pictures. Or a recording. Or something more credible than described memories of my encounter in the desert. But as with many mysterious and occult occurrences, it happened so fast there was no time for witness or capture.

My daughter, Livvy, and I had visited spectacular Joshua Tree National Park during the day on March 17, 2022. We drove and hiked around the park and looked for a camping spot with no luck.

We knew there was Bureau of Land Management (BLM) territory outside the town of Joshua Tree, and that was our fallback. About an hour before sunset, we exited the national park and drove to the BLM land. We took a right off the paved road and drove in about a half mile on dirt road surrounded by open, flat, sage-brushed desert terrain, and found a spot to pitch our tents for the night.

Camping on Bureau of Land Management land outside Joshua Tree, CA

As we got out and stretched, perusing our surroundings, Livvy said, “What the heck is that?”

Across the desert expanse, maybe five miles to the east, hovering over the distant mountains, was a black, vaguely roundish object. Not sitting still in place, but not flying either. Rather it was moving slightly side to side. Hovering. It was far away and difficult to see. It remained there for at least an hour as we set about pitching our tents and preparing dinner.

A weather balloon, I offered? Livvy didn’t think so. She could see the strange object better than I.

Flying Train

Darkness fell. We went about our business, having dinner, softening our tent interiors for slumber. We shelved thoughts of the mysterious object for the moment.

A full moon shone, and around 9:30 p.m. Livvy and I retired to our respective tents. I laid down and pulled up a Netflix movie. Around 9:45 a sound unlike anything I’ve heard before entered my auditory field and gradually grew louder. I lifted my head to listen better.

The only way I can think of to describe it is like a train flying over us. It sounded like a flying craft, slightly and quickly undulating but not like wings. The sound didn’t resemble jet propulsion either. Like a loud train growing closer and closer.

As it became quite loud, something close overhead, I began to push up so I could see outside my tent. The moment I began pushing up, the loud train sound whooshed and was gone in a split second. I looked all around the desert and in the sky. Nothing.

“What in the heck was that?” Livvy said from her tent. “What in the hell…” I said simultaneously. We were both glad each other heard it, too.

The entire occurrence lasted about five seconds.

Unexplained Freaky Occurrence

I lay awake after the noise for at least two hours before I was able to drift off. Wondering.

Livvy and I talked about it, mulling what it could have been. A drone? Definitely not a personal drone, and not like any drone I’ve ever seen. Military drone? Quite unlikely that a military drone operator would risk the danger of buzzing a couple of desert campers. Perhaps an experimental, high-tech flying craft, or some sort of surveillance operation? Possibly.

I’ve since heard about high-tech companies with labs in the desert experimenting on future air and space craft. By some accounts, the Mojave has become what Area 51 used to be: a hotbed of experimental flying technology that inspire stories like mine from visitors to the area.

Perhaps the flying object, whatever it was, came from one of those experimenting companies. Or…? Something not of this world?

A Mystified Cynic

To explain emphatically, I am not nor have I ever been someone to believe in things beyond what can be proved. Nearly all occurrences in my life can be explained. On the other hand, I am also open to possibilities in the universe beyond what our science can yet encapsulate. Sometimes I’ve been witness to very strange coincidences that speak to an energy that our human imagining has not yet identified.

But our encounter with…whatever it was in the Mojave Desert was a rare one in which I still have no explanation.

When we arose to the sunrise in the morning, the black object we’d seen the night before, hanging over the distant mountains, was gone.

One other thing, maybe not so strange: my watch was 10 minutes slow the next morning. It is a cheap, traveling watch, and it has since been dragging slightly, likely a dying battery. Still, it hasn’t once lost an entire 10 minutes in one night.

Cocktail Party Fodder

What was it that buzzed us out there in the desert? Was the noise related to the black object in the sky? Is it worth spending time in contemplation?

I’ve since related the incident to many people and have yet to hear anyone offer any slight knowledge of what it might have been.

Livvy and I remain mystified. But what the hell, it makes for a good story.

If anyone has knowledge or guesses as to what might have swooped near us in the desert, please comment below.

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Adventure in Profile

Martie McNabb, Personal Historian, Legacy Artist, Nomad

Martie McNabb with her beloved road companion “Brooklyn”

A few years ago, Martie McNabb sold her apartment in Brooklyn, purchased a Winnebago Travato RV, and hit the road.

She was 59 at the time. And she’s been on the road ever since.

Martie, now 62, promptly named her Winnebago “Brooklyn,” in homage to her beloved city of 24 years. These days, she spends part of the year in Vermont, where her mother lives in warm seasons, and another part in Albuquerque, where her partner, Judy, has lived for most of her life.

The rest of the time, Martie lives in Brooklyn (again, the Winnebago, not the city), freely traversing the highways and taking in the sights across the United States, staying in campgrounds, RV parks and the occasional Cracker Barrel parking lot.

“I feel like, at this point, this is indefinite,” she says of her nomadic way of life. “Until I’m not able to do it anymore physically.”

Business Adventures

Martie has always had an adventurous spirit, she says, noting that her current cross-country travels are not her first. “I used to cross-country travel back in my youth, then in my Toyota Camry and car camping.”

When she got a job as a high school biology teacher, she settled down in Brooklyn (the city this time) and bought an apartment, where she lived for more than two decades.

“But the cost of living started getting ridiculous” in and around New York City, she said. “I couldn’t even afford to hire a coach.” That, combined with the negative effects of gentrification in her neighborhood, nudged her to sell her apartment and leave her job. “”That was the first decision I made,” she says. “It was just this perfect storm of everything happening at the same time.”

Meanwhile, Martie had started a business, Memories Out of the Box, through which she assists people in organizing and archiving personal memorabilia and visual memories to provide them with access to their past lives and the lives of their loved ones.

“I feel like it’s healing work,” she says of Memories Out of the Box, “to help my clients reconnect with family and friends.”

Martie followed that business with another startup a few years ago, Show & Tales, a business marketing and community-building service in which the host and participants share stories of the things they keep as a way to generate word-of-mouth buzz for their business endeavors. By doing so, they are also able to make deep connections with their own and each other’s personal histories.

As a proprietor of two online businesses, Martie has the freedom to nourish her adventure spirit on the road while generating income.

30 Years in the Making

One fortuitous connection – or reconnection, that is, after 30 years – that resulted, in part, from Martie’s nomadic lifestyle is her relationship with Judy.

Martie (right), Judy (left), their pet dog and Brooklyn interior

Martie and Judy had dated briefly when they were in their early 30s, but mutually drifted apart as their lives moved on, Judy remaining in her hometown of Albuquerque as Martie moved to the East coast. Then, about three years ago, Martie was scheduled to be in Alburquerque for a conference with The Photo Managers, and looked Judy up.

“It had been about 25 years since we’d seen each other,” she says. They got together, “and we started talking, then dating, and then we admitted our feelings for each other.”

Martie and Judy have continued their relationship over two years since of living together part of the time, and remaining together while separated by more than 2,200 miles the rest of the year.

Not Perfect

For Martie, her life on the road feels like a natural fit. The highlights of her lifestyle are the freedom and the people she meets.

“I like people, I like when I’m with people, and people watching,” she says. “I need time to myself, but I do like seeing people, seeing the way they live, everyone lives their lives differently.”

She loves exploring different parts of the country and seeing the different ways people and cultures are shaped and defined by their environment. “It’s fascinating, people dealing with challenges of different areas, and how people are different depending on where they live. I just find it fascinating.”

As free and interesting as life is on the road, it’s not always easy, Martie emphasizes.

Prices are inflated, for one thing, and paying for hiked gasoline rates makes a noticeable impact. “It really is not that inexpensive to live this life,” she says. There’s the high up-front cost of buying a vehicle suitable for living. And paying for park residence plus electricity at a camp site add to the daily expense.

And every day has its small inconveniences. Martie loves to cook, for example. But cooking in an RV isn’t ideal. “Everything smells like whatever you’re cooking,” she notes. “That’s a little challenge.” Also, it can be hard to get around once you’re parked and hooked up for electricity. You can’t hop in your car and run into town. “In order to go any place, you have to plan around that,” she says.

Finally, just getting in and out of Brooklyn, and for that matter climbing in and out of her elevated bed inside Brooklyn, require physical agility. “Some of these things I probably won’t be able to do anymore at my mother’s age.”

Adventure Dream Life

Still, for now, Martie points out, she wouldn’t trade it. She gets to live freely on the road, and spend extended time with people she loves who live far apart.

She meets a huge spectrum of interesting people and operates two businesses from an office on four wheels. The road is endless and always full of possibilities, and she’s planning an open-ended road trip out to the West coast this year.

Altogether, Martie is living an adventurer’s dream life, and she appreciates the opportunity.

“I have felt like I’m very lucky,” she says.

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A Road Trip to Florida

A landscape view of the sea and a small island from Rowell's Waterfront Park, Key Largo, Fla

I’m always up for a road trip. There’s no feeling quite like hitting the open road in a car, the excitement of rolling miles away, the escape out of town, the change of perspective, music playing, scenery changing and open, endless road stretched out in front of you. There’s something about a road trip that inspires contemplation and a fresh view on life.

Now, some people might not label a road trip to Florida as much of an adventure. And, relatively speaking, it’s not that exotic.

Still, it checks the boxes for my definition of adventure: it’s an activity out of the ordinary; it holds a degree of risk (if you’ve driven on the Florida freeways, you know what I’m talking about; it certainly involves movement, literally in this case; and it includes a modicum of overcoming challenge.

Like some of the best adventures, my most recent road trip to Florida was borne out of necessity and urgency. My son, Elliot, who lives and works in Key Largo, was the victim of a hit-and-run rear-end car accident (his car was rear-ended; see above re: Florida drivers). As an unfortunate result, his old car was totaled; that is, not worth the expense of the body work it would take to fix it. So he needed a car, and his mother happened to be considering buying a new car anyway. So I volunteered to drive her Nissan down to Florida for Elliot to use.

This was an impromptu trip, and I opted not to take time away from work in order to do it. That meant I had very little time for the trip. Now, From Western Massachusetts, where I live, to Key Largo, at the very bottom of the state just where the string of keys begins, is about 1,600 miles. At a good pace, you’re talking about 24 hours of driving.

To avoid heavy Northeast traffic, I opted to leave at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday and drive through the night. It was a good move, as I whizzed through New York City and New Jersey, buzzed by Philadelphia, and cruised along the Washington, D.C. beltway, I-495. The drawback of night driving is the sacrifice of any scenery. It’s just you and the dark highway with shadows of trees and the moon’s glow keeping you company.

I crossed the border from Virginia into North Carolina at around 5 a.m., ready for a nap. I pulled into the first rest area I saw. Thankfully, I was piloting an SUV that had plenty of stretch-out room in the back, and I came prepared with my well-used sleep pad and sleeping bag. Slumber came quickly and lasted a solid hour and a half, all I needed to invigorate more hours on the road.

Six more hours of friendly, rural daylight driving (minus gas and food stops) brought me to the Georgia border with Florida, and a sign that let me know, to my disappointment, that I still had six more hours to go to the keys. Florida is a long, flat state.

The details of driving through Florida are murky. At some point along these straight, flat roads shooting due south, you glaze over the reedy, swampy inlets of swamp. Now and then the view is gorgeous, like when you catch the open sea off to the left and it beckons you. But you don’t want to become too enamored with these drivers speeding dangerously past at 90 miles per hour.

I navigated through Miami highways in mid-evening, hopped happily onto Route 1 out to the keys, and arrived at my son’s place in Key Largo around 9 p.m. Exhausted, but, thanks to caffeine, ready to take him out for a beer at his choice of venue.

I spent Sunday with Elliot and flew back Monday. A compact adventure, and mission accomplished.

Along the way I learned a few things, as one always does during adventures big and small. I learned that, for me, it doesn’t matter what mode of transportation I’m using to go from one place to another. Car, truck, bike, walking, hiking, running, boating. It’s all good. The movement is the key factor, and for some reason I am happiest when I’m moving. I can’t be the only one. I’ll continue to study this phenomenon and write more about it.

I also relearned, as I do every time I travel across this country, that the United States is diverse, often beautiful, and vast. One of my favorite aspects of traveling is observing the gradual and sudden changes in terrain, landscape and culture. Seeing how and where people live.

I returned from my road trip to Florida with freshened perspective, renewed energy and a few memories. That’s why we take adventures.