When I moved from Ottawa to Berkeley in August of 1998, I decided to drive, partially because I wanted to bring my car with me (I don't always feel that this was a wise decision nowadays), and partially because it sounded like an interesting drive. Which it was, and I'd like to provide a soon to be illustrated account of it here.
My plan to move to California extends pretty far back; however, my plan to drive there originated sometime in winter of 1998. When I got my car (which was an early birthday/graduation gift from my mother), I intended to leave it with my sister once I moved away. However, I have since grown rather attached to my car, and am much less willing to give it up now. Fortunately, my sister's decision not to move to Canada just yet made it even easier to take my car with me to grad school. Sometime in the winter, my good friend Dan and I started making vague plans for the road trip before I was even accepted to UC Berkeley. When in April my acceptance was finalized (which is a story in its own, but probably less deserving of public attention than this one), things seemed pretty decided, and I started, slowly but surely, preparing for the move.
However, sometime around June of 1998, after talking to Kevin, who was also headed to Berkeley in the fall, but had actually bothered to read some of the materials that were mailed to him, I discovered that I was going to leave earlier than anticipated - ie. early August, as opposed to early September. However, Dan's work schedule was geared towards a late August deadline, and he couldn't really afford to take time off in early August for a road trip. I was all too familiar with deadline pressures at that particular time, so I sympathized with the situation, but I also did not feel like spending three to five days on the road by myself, so I started looking for an alternate.
One would think that it's pretty easy to convince people to come for a road trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, even if they have to find their own way back; normally this is true. However, most of my friends with whom I'd be willing to spend three days in a car were taking courses in Waterloo at the time, and my trip coincided with the Spring term's final exam period -- something that most people don't want to miss. Fortunately, just before I had resigned myself to making the drive by myself, I discovered that my friend Ben, who was working at the time, was in fact looking for a vacation around the same time frame, and was definitely interested in visiting California. While I can't recall the exact date this was decided, my problem was resolved.
A couple of weeks before the start date, I started making plans. I ordered a TripTik from CAA, and also upgraded my membership to Gold, which allowed for 200km towing. The former was pretty helpful in figuring out where to go and where to stay. While I never had to use the latter, I highly recommend it to anyone who's planning a road trip of a comparable length - the cost is well worth the security it provides. The "get out of jail free" card that comes with the membership is also a nice thing to have on your person while travelling through foreign states.
My mechanic assured me that safe for an oil leak, my car was just fine and should have no problem making the trip. Making a mental note to myself to check oil periodically, I went on to frenetically take care of other errands that needed done before leaving the country (like getting my visa and passport in order). Finally, on the night of Friday, the 7th of August, I started packing. Taking a few hours to nap at night, I had finally assembled all the belongings that I was going to take with me, and lo and behold, they all fit inside my car. (For those of you familiar with the size of an Isuzu Impulse, this should sound impressive). Saturday morning I was ready to set off, so at about noon, I left my house. I returned shortly to pick up my cellphone, and as far as I can tell, I had not forgotten anything else. This continues to impress me to this day.
The drive to Toronto was familiar and fairly uneventful; I spoke with my sister on the phone, and picked up some essential documents for Ben left at a donut shop (sometimes I love non-urban culture). While in Toronto I managed to coordinate getting three friends and one significant other (not mine) to come to Waterloo for dinner, to which, of course, we were all very late. The dinner in Waterloo was quite good; a lot of people were present. The occasion also included Kevin's departure to Berkeley, which followed mine by a few days, as well as his birthday. People were hanging out until late night; finally, a small group of us relocated to a friend's house to watch a movie (since this is what we do). I was able to catch half an hour of sleep, and then we went out for breakfast sometime around 7 am.
Ben and I said our goodbyes and headed out and finally set out to California at 9am. My ability to get lost demonstrated itself nearly immediately, as we missed the 401 and ended up on Highway 8 headed to Stratford. It took us until 10:30 to find the 401 again (granted, we were headed west). At 12pm we made our final stop in Canada, visited the last Tim Horton's I would see for a while, and picked up a box of timbits. We were 50km from the border, and we pressed on.
Crossing the border took a little time, but was relatively painless. By 1:45pm we were on I-94 heading west towards Ann Arbor. Ben started finding driving in the states a little stressful, with the traffic patterns and the maze of highways around Detroit. It didn't help that we weren't willing to go much faster than the speed limit in a foreign county. This fear would quickly go away.
We started enjoying the fact that we were in the USA at lunch, when we gased up on really cheap gas, and picked up a few bottles of Surge, which is sadly not available in Canada. Our third purchase was duct tape; we were set.
Around 4:30pm, while driving on I-75, I believe, I started realizing that not getting any sleep before setting off was probably not the best of ideas. I came really close to falling asleep behind the wheel while among three lanes of quickly moving traffic. Finally I woke myself up enough to pull over and get some black coffee, things were fine after that.
Not far from Chicago, we encountered a traffic jam which took us from 5:30pm until about 7pm to pass through. This reinforced our decision not to stop in Chicago, as we were behind schedule as it was. We finally made it to Moline, IL, just on the border of Iowa at around 10pm. After having a healthy midwest dinner of ribs, we went and got some much needed sleep.
We got up at around 9am (Central time), and after breakfast went for a quick shopping trip in South Park Mall, whose name we found pretty amusing. We bought a camera and some cute postcards, took some pictures, and we headed back towards the I-80 around 11. Iowa continued to present us with the flat land and corn fields we had gotten used to in Illinois.
Lunch was had in Des Moines. During our stay there we were able to make enough phone calls to arrange for a place to stay in Berkeley, as well as discover that roaches can live in gas stations. *shudder*
Finally made it to Nebraska around 5pm. Log entries:
Nebraska turned out to be even more flat than Iowa; we went on a 350km stretch without any hills whatsoever. I discovered that I didn't have to adjust pressure on the gas pedal at all to maintain a constant speed. Started wishing for cruise control shortly thereafter, once my foot started getting numb.
After dinner we decided to abandon our plan of driving through Denver, since we were probably too tired to drive in, and definitely too tired to be touristy, so we stayed on the I-80 and headed to Cheyenne, WY. At that point we started being paranoid about roaches having crawled into the car from gas stations; I'm not sure if any actually had, but we were seeing and feeling phantom roaches everywhere. We finally made it to our place of stay at midnight Mountain time; we were glad to be out of the car and in a bed.
We left Cheyenne around 8:45 in the morning; got lost for a while, as was expected, but finally made it back to the old faithful I-80. At 11:45, I finally ate the last of the timbits. It had travelled around 1500km from its home, and was consequently pretty stale. We didn't win a trip for two, as it turned out.
The roads were getting mountainous enough that maintaining 80mph became difficult, especially with the air conditioning on. We started playing with the gear settings on the car, with some success. Discovered shortly that if we hit a mountain at 80mph, the car would inevitably slow down to at most 60mph, but if we were going 90mph, we could maintain that for a good while (fun with power output curves). We, of course, took this as a licence to speed blatantly; on one large downhill stretch the car reached the speed of 110mph, which is the fastest I had ever gone in my car. It felt quite a bit less comfortable than 100, so we didn't follow that speed for too long.
At lunch we discovered a Taco Time, which can run circles around Taco Bell any day of the week, but unfortunately, it doesn't exist out east. Went on to Salt Lake City, which was preceeded by a fun descent - the car maintained a healthy 80mph with foot off the gas and engine in third for breaking! Along the road were several "runaway truck ramps"; we found this pretty interesting.
Salt Lake City was very hot, getting back into the car after lunch was trying. Stopped off at a gas station just outside town after we discovered that there wouldn't be any others for the next 40 miles. Little did we know that there would be absolutely nothing for that stretch of the road. Welcome to the Great Salt Lake Desert! I had gotten used to flat roads in Nebraska; however, this 40 mile stretch of road also had no turns - a very surreal experience. We could see the mountains on the Nevada border, but the highway itself dropped off the horizon before it ever reached them.
Nevada was reached at around 6pm Pacific (our pattern of changing timezones every night was continuing). We made a number of stops that day, often being unable to find suitable food - finally settled for a Burger King (Log entry: "It was either that or Denny's"). We finally arrived at a sleazy motel in Reno at 12:30am - the distance driven compounded by the number of stops resulted in us being completely exhausted.
After having breakfast at an IHOP, we headed out on our final leg. I had the pleasure of driving through the hills around Lake Tahoe, going through another fun descent involving mostly 6% grades and lots of engine break. We finally made it to Berkeley around 2pm; parked my car and went for a tour of campus. We were disappointed to discover that we had missed a minor earthquake by only a few hours; on the other hand, driving during an earthquake after three and a half days on the road would have probably been not the nicest experience. So, after three and a half days of driving (four if you count my drive from Ottawa) and 4900km, we were finally there.
As tired as I was after the drive, and as much as I never wanted to get behind the wheel of a car again, I'd really love to do this or a similar drive again. I really do enjoy driving, and sightseeing. My biggest complaint with the drive was that it always felt like we were behind schedule. Next time I would rather take at least a week, make lots of detours, and just enjoy the drive. The alternative that I'm considering is going completely insane and making the drive from Toronto to San Francisco (or vice versa) in less 48 hours or less - I know it can be done, and I also know it involves precious little sleep. Maybe I'll drive down to Canada and back this summer, and do both. It all depends on how well my car is running, and whether I can find someone else to come with me.