In the spirit of Steinbeck, Kerouac, and Clark Griswold, we hit the road tomorrow for a cross country journey to see US.  Brother Jeff will accompany me to Tucson, and I will continue to the Pacific from there.  First stop, Tuscaloosa, AL as we get on the road.

I did not do a great deal of prep for the trip, I did fill up the car at Costco, took my golf clubs out of the trunk, and packed a suitcase.  I had a general idea of where I wanted to go, but I didn't mark a map but rather just put two pins in Google maps to get a feel for drive times.  I went ahead and prepaid two nights in hotels in Tuscaloosa and Dallas.  That set up a Wednesday morning tour of Dealy Plaza.  I also set an appointment in San Diego on Friday and went ahead and prepaid for a night in Sedona on Monday.  This set the general parameters of the trip.

Jeff got a pretty good rate for a flight from Tucson, so that gave us an aiming point for the first couple of days travel.

I will probably put this in a slightly different way in a conclusion statement, but travel, particularly by car on the interstate system, has devolved into a get in the car and go.  With internet access readily available, GPS, cell phones all make travel pretty straight forward.  I would have enjoyed a wireless card for the computer or a smart phone, as I could have gotten information quicker and could have posted blogs more often.  A twitter account might have been cool too.  (Put these on the checklist for next time.)

I was talking to sister in law Mari the other day, and I told her I remember her telling of cross country trips with her family.  Her father would call AAA and get an itinerary with a flip book arrangement with maps and other helps.

That said, there is the backside time, but in a zenlike way, it is the journey and not the destination that makes a cross country car trip the value that it is.