Posted in Flashbulb Memories, Kitsch Factor, Road Trip Tales, Three-fer Friday, Uncategorized on Feb 5th, 2010
Love, love, love. During the Valentine’s Day season (I’ve been spotting heart-shaped candy boxes in the shops since December), you either love hearing about it or love to hate it. This time of year, travel is all about the romantic getaway. As if true lovers really need spa treatments and roses and for romance. (Not [...]
Posted in How-To: America 101, Road Trip Tales on Nov 4th, 2009
Nearly 4 million miles of roads. That’s what we’ve got here in the U.S. Those of you who have been reading Flyover America for a while (or, even, for just a post) probably realize that a number like 4 million presents a problem if you’re a Flyover America type in the midst of conjuring up [...]
Posted in Flashbulb Memories, Road Trip Tales, Uncategorized on Oct 14th, 2009
In 1977, I took my first cross-country trip with two girlfriends. I was 19 years old and, except for 10 days in London when I was 15, I’d never left the East Coast. Actually, I’d barely been out of New York City. Partway through the drive, I started writing a letter to my brother documenting [...]
Posted in America on Film on Oct 12th, 2009
With David Lynch behind the project, it’s reasonable to expect a layer of surreal* would shroud the Interview Project. His Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks visions of life in America are hardly comforting. They may be fun to watch–especially, it should be said, for college students experimenting with various altered states–but, like a maximum security [...]
Posted in America on Film, Outdoorsiness, State-by-State on Sep 10th, 2009
As a total word nerd, I’m always inventing new phrases on road trips.
In the lexicon I’ve developed with my friends, “To Clark” means “to overly plan an adventure in an attempt to make sure everyone will have a great time, only to see the plans backfire, causing disastrous results.”
The verb is a direct reference to [...]
Posted in Seeing America on Aug 13th, 2009
Anonymity is alive and well in the heart of the U.S. hotel lobby.
With all of the human comings and goings, everyone’s the same. Even at those properties that employ security guards, there is no way for desk clerks to get a commanding sense of which visitors are guests, which visitors might be legitimate acquaintances of [...]
Posted in America on Film on Aug 10th, 2009
I’ve found a new-to-me, road-trip flick to add to my list of favorites: Duets which was released in 2000 and stars Paul Giametti, Gwyneth Paltrow (whose dad directed), Huey Lewis and a bunch of other cool people, including cameos by Angie Dickinson and Maya Rudolph.
The story takes place in the world of high-stakes karaoke (where [...]
Posted in Outdoorsiness, State-by-State on Jul 16th, 2009
No greater test of friendship exists than a six-day road trip in a 32-foot RV (or, if you prefer the industry lingo, motorhome). In college, I would have named seeing my best friend start dating the love of my life/cute boy down the hall (drama, blurgh) as the end-all be-all of friendship tests but [...]
Posted in American Tunes on Jul 10th, 2009
While the invention of iPods made things far easier than the days when we had to go through stack and stacks of cassettes to create the perfect on-the-road mixed tapes, there’s still an art to creating the perfect road trip playlist. It takes time, thought, a sense of humor, and a wide-ranging music collection in [...]
Posted in How-To: America 101, State-by-State, Uncategorized on May 8th, 2009
My husband Tom and I recently drove a loop south from Albuquerque. (Here’s an annotated map of our route, in case you want to follow in our tire tracks.) This was the first time I’ve Twittered from the road. Interestingly, the great to-Twitter-or-not-to-Twitter debate started up on World Hum while I was Twittering my trip [...]
