Sorry for the big gap in coverage there for a while…I had intended to get some more post-trip entries up here shortly after I got home, but I got a little wrapped up in some other projects...and here we are four months later. Anyway, I did finally get around to it, so here goes—it’s a long one. Photos are just random shots from all over the trip that didn’t get posted previously, so enjoy.
I knew I wanted to do sort of a “wrap-up” post at the end of the trip, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about doing it. Driving for that many months and miles gives one a lot of opportunities to both see things and afterward to think about what you’ve seen, unlike many vacations that can turn into just running through a scheduled checklist within the time available, leaving very little opportunity for detours or reflection. Still, not knowing quite how to go at this, I figured I’d start with the easy stuff and just begin with some figures.
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The Statistics
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Practical Knowledge
At the very least, I learned a little about how to do a road trip in a relatively small car, and I gained some knowledge about some things that were useful or not so useful. Here’s a brief recap of some of that stuff.
Car- and Travel-Related Items
Likewise, for repair supplies, I had a variety of sealants, tapes, safety wire, clamps, wraps, electrical splicing and repair stuff, and a few personal protection items like gloves and safety glasses. Here’s a picture of the repair goodies:
As they say, your mileage may vary on this stuff. The tool kit had both generic and Datsun-specific elements to it; for example, I didn’t bring any wrenches or sockets for bolt sizes that weren’t on the car. I also didn’t have a set of jumper cables with me, which I debated back and forth on. I never needed them, but I may try to find a compact set for the next trip just in case. Another trip would likely have a kit that would be tailored to the specific car, the expected terrain and distance from civilization, and how much room is available to carry tools, but this was my kit and it worked very well for me.
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Non-Automotive Stuff
I also had a number of things with me that were not specifically car- or travel-related that worked extremely well. Some of the highlights:
If you needed to boil it down to the basics, you’re looking for clothes that are tough, easy to take care of, and that layer up well. You’re going to keep warm and dry not by having a lot of different types of clothes with you, but by layering a couple basic types of clothes on top of each other as necessary to match the weather, going from one (or sometimes zero) layers when it’s hot to four or five when it’s chilly and/or wet out. Some of this stuff is more expensive than regular clothes when you look at it on a piece-by-piece basis (for example, a nice pair of SmartWool socks is something like $18-20, which would probably get you a dozen pair of regular socks at Target), but it’s completely worth the money when it’s all that you’re going to be wearing for a while under less-than-optimal conditions.
5. Navigation: I had a few things to help me get around and figure out where I was. First, you definitely want to carry a good paper map and/or atlas, plus a compass. If you're using your cell phone as a GPS, there's a really good chance you'll lose your data connection a lot, and even if you've got a normal GPS with you, there's a decent chance it'll get lost, damaged, or stolen. I carried the Rand McNally spiral bound road atlas and a Suunto compass, and for electronic navigation I had an older Garmin Nuvi GPS with me (I've since upgraded to the 2597 after the old one got stolen), plus the Google Maps app on my phone.
6.Camera Equipment: A lot of people have commented on the photos in the blog, and a lot of the quality can be attributed to the equipment I was carrying. I wanted to be able to take good photos on the trip, because who knows whether I’ll be back to some of these places again, so I brought good camera equipment for that. Here’s what I had:
That’s it for camera and photo stuff. I feel like I learned quite a bit more about how to use the equipment and take better pictures on this trip, which has been a nice unexpected bonus. Hopefully I’ll continue to get better as I practice more, but it was pretty great having the opportunity to see all these places and share photos with the blog readers.
7. Airbnb: This service wasn’t even on my radar when I started out on the trip; it was recommended by a friend when I passed through LA early in the trip. For those of you unfamiliar with Airbnb, it’s a web-based service that facilitates and brokers transactions between travelers and hosts who have extra bedrooms or guest houses or couches or whatever so that those travelers can use those bedrooms and those hosts can make a little extra money. I stayed in dozens of Airbnb places with a wide variety of hosts, and my experiences ranged from “OK” to “fantastic”, with no bad experiences anywhere. You get to meet the kind of outgoing, generous people you’d want to meet on a trip to new places, as those are the kind of people who’d be OK with having complete strangers sleep in their house, you get to find out a lot more about the area you’re in from those locals, and in many cases you get to make some new friendships that will continue beyond your trip. There were a lot of listings where it was pretty obvious that the hosts were just trying to make a little extra cash (“the key is under the mat, text me when you leave”), and there’s really nothing wrong with that—you still get to stay in a nice place that isn’t a hotel, although you don’t get the personal interaction. If you read the listings carefully though, you can pick out the hosts that are definitely into it in order to meet interesting people from lots of different places, and they are the folks you want to stay with, as those are far and away the best experiences. I had many great meals, adventures, conversations, and other fun with a lot of people that I’d only known for a couple of hours, and it really added immeasurably to the fun of the trip as a whole. I stayed in a lot of very nice homes, as well as in a barn, on a boat, in a treehouse, under an awning, in a yurt, and on more than a few lakes and rivers, and on average all for about the same as your average Motel 6 room would cost.
8. Spares and Backups: Like the spare parts for the car, the trip should also have its share of spares and backups for things that’d make life difficult if you lost them or they stopped working. In no particular order:
In short, you never want to find yourself in a situation where you’ve had a problem and you’ve got no options to resolve it, so if there’s anything at all that you have that you can’t just say “oh well, that’s too bad” to if it’s damaged, lost, or stolen, then back that thing up somehow, preferably in more than one way. Do not count on being able to access a telephone or the internet for anything really important, keep physical backups with you in some way—if you lose your wallet, make sure you keep a backup for the important items that were in it somewhere in the car. If it’s in the car and you lose your car, make sure there’s a backup on your person. If you’ve got a contact list on your phone, print out or write down the important numbers and keep them someplace else. It can be a bit of work to get all of this thought through and set up, but you’ll be happy you did it if you ever have a problem, especially if you’re travelling alone and in remote locations.
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That’s probably enough for the practical knowledge learned from the trip. If anybody is planning anything similar and wants to ask me anything, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll answer any questions as best as I can. Now, on to some impractical knowledge gained…
First off, I found that the type of travelling that I did is a very different kind that not many people get to experience. At first glance, it looks a lot like a regular road trip (albeit somewhat long) or vacation, but the whole dynamic of not having a fixed destination, route, or schedule changed the nature of the journey in ways that I wasn’t really expecting.
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I am acutely aware that I’m in an unusual ‘life’ situation that allowed me to take a trip like this. Selling the business gave me some financial means and stability while at the same time relieved me of a huge number of responsibilities and commitments. The all-consuming, 24-hour-a-day nature of running that business also meant that I never developed any other serious responsibilities—never married, no kids, no pets, not even a houseplant to take care of. So there I was, with unlimited time, adequate money in my pocket, zero responsibilities, a cool car, and thousands of miles of open road in front of me. That’s a significantly different situation than just having a few weeks to take a vacation and trying to cram in as much as possible, or being a fresh-out-of-school kid roadtripping on a tight budget, or even taking a fixed-length sabbatical where you know you’ve got to get back to ‘real life’ at some point. I’ve traveled a lot and all over the planet in my life (mostly for work) but this was probably the first time that I really felt like I was traveling instead of just trying to get someplace. Most of the best things that I saw on the trip were places that I just stumbled across while driving down some back road, and the whole aspect of not having a timeline or a destination was definitely a huge contributing factor to the effectiveness of this trip in letting me decompress.
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The other somewhat unexpected thing on the trip is obvious in retrospect, but definitely wasn’t when I started: The benefits of traveling in the car that I was driving. The vistas and opportunities that opened up on the trip that were entirely due to driving that car were unexpected to say the very least. When I started out, I pretty much just thought it’d be a fun challenge and that it would add some interest to the blog for what I expected would be maybe a couple dozen readers; friends and family mostly. If you’ve read through the blog to this point, you know that it became much more—dozens of new friends made, probably hundreds of encounters and discussions with people that I otherwise never would have spoken to, an incredible level of outreach and support from the sports car community at large, some ridiculously generous hospitality from Nissan itself, and some happy encounters and wider exposure from the guys at Petrolicious and Jalopnik. And now, more than two months after the trip is over, it’s still going on—I’ve driven the car probably another 3,000 miles since the end of the trip, and there have been people that actually recognize it on the street as “that car from YouTube.” Granted, the giant deer-shaped dent in the front makes it somewhat unmistakable, but it’s still pretty phenomenal that regular people on the street see the car as a little mini-celebrity. And, like I said in the earlier Petrolicious interview, I don’t think I would have had nearly the same experience in a different sports car, and certainly not if I was driving something less approachable like a Lamborghini or an Aston Martin. I don’t think that even another sports car of the era—something like an older Triumph or Austin Healey or Alfa Romeo—would have gotten the same response. There’s something about the car being both an unusual sports car and a Datsun that made it appeal to both the car geeks and the regular folks. Driving a Datsun, by all outward appearances I was not some rich jerk with a fancy high performance car or some strange eccentric trying to hand-crank a TR-2, I was just a guy in a neat car on a cool trip, and everybody responded positively to that. (Not that I wouldn’t want to do it again in something really eccentric and/or high performance, mind you—I could definitely be either of those guys.) I’ve gone on at some length about this before and it’s really hard to put into words, but I’m sure you get the general idea.
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Which brings me to the people I met. As an engineer specializing in behind-the-scenes machinery and control systems, I have never been what you’d call ‘outgoing’ or exceptionally adept at social interactions. However, driving around for nine months in the world’s greatest social ice breaker, showing up to sleep in the homes of dozens of perfect strangers, and eating by myself at hundreds of different places and striking up conversations therein most definitely improved my social skills. That allowed me to discover that most people out there are really good people—the jerks and sociopaths are in the minority, but they do tend to get much more attention, and in many ‘normal’ settings (work, business, etc.) they can have a disproportionate effect on your day-to-day life, which can make it sometimes seem like there’s bad people absolutely everywhere and you can’t trust anybody. That’s definitely no way to go through life, so it was incredibly refreshing to make so many new friends and experience such fantastic generosity and hospitality all throughout the trip. That includes people that I met in the flesh and people who sent me email through the blog—there were dozens of people who sent me really great messages but who didn’t want to leave public comments (you know who you are), and these came literally from all over the world. There’s wonderful people everywhere out there, you just need to get to a place where you can meet them, in person or otherwise. Combine this experience with some of the absolutely extraordinary natural sights and places I visited, and you’ve got a recipe for the experience of a lifetime.
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While it was definitely never boring, it wasn’t always sunshine and roses. One of the side effects of staying off the interstates and sticking to the back roads meant that I traveled through hundreds of small towns all throughout the US and Canada. While I didn’t stay in any one place long enough to really get an in-depth look at things, I was able to get a flavor of each town and its local citizenry. A theme that carried throughout the entire country (and a good part of Canada) was that as a country the US is full of towns that all ‘used to do’ a lot of different things. Very few of the places I visited had a real central identity anymore—places that ‘used to’ be all about timber or steel or mining or textiles or farming or any number of the trades and industries that people associate with a healthy, vibrant economy and society were everywhere, and the small businesses that make up a healthy community were all gone. Small towns were really struggling, mid-sized towns were overrun with Wal-Marts and Taco Bells, and bigger cities seemed to really separate the places that people lived from the places that people congregated and shopped and worked. Places that really functioned well as smaller towns and communities were very few and far between; I could probably count them on one hand. All of the symptoms of relatively abstract concepts that you see on the news like income disparity and the effects of industrial deregulation and the dismantling of the anti-trust system back in the 1980s were very palpable and very in-your-face over vast swaths of the country.
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Naturally, having hundreds of hours by myself in a car with a barely functional AM radio gave me some opportunity to reflect on this a little. Almost every small- to mid-sized town with an obviously vibrant past seemed to have that past be somewhere between the late 1800s to the late 1930s or so, judging from the architecture and other features of the towns. What was going on back then to produce such nationwide prosperity? Early on, the expansion into the West was a huge economic bonfire that we couldn’t throw enough firewood on—railroads, steel, lumber, food, you name it—the expansion of the population into the west could consume practically everything that industries east of the Mississippi could throw at it, as well as develop hundreds of industries in the west on its own. Following hot on the heels of that was WWI, which gave a big boost to steel and other manufacturing industries, and then the economy crashed in 1929, not to be meaningfully revived until WWII. The glorious main streets of the small towns of America seem to almost all come from that early era. I’m no economist or social scientist, but in trying to understand why wealth is so unevenly distributed across the country and why the nostalgic small town America that everyone loves seems so rare, it would appear that unfettered capitalism comes with some very unpalatable social costs. Even in those boom eras, the prosperity came at a cost—strip mining and clear cutting destroyed huge swaths of the environment, rapid economic expansion without regulation resulted in robber barons and factory fires, and anybody who’s ever read the Grapes of Wrath knows what happened to the towns of the Midwest when the soil of the Great Plains was ripped up willy-nilly for farmland. The Sherman and Clayton Acts, the reforms of Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, more reasonable regulation of industry, and higher progressive income tax rates seem to have led to the strong middle class that we had in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but we’ve dismantled a lot of that since about the 1980s, and you can see the very real results of those actions in the heartland.
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If I had an answer to the question of how to revive middle America, I’d be President. I’m only really starting to even think about it and look at the situation due to the things I saw on the trip. Maybe it’s inevitable; maybe the human tendency toward short term interests and grabbing whatever you can get for yourself regardless of the expense to the rest of society means that large societies will always bounce from economic bubble to economic bubble and that the arc of growth, prosperity, and decline is just how it goes. If you look at the great civilizations and societies of the past—China, Greece, Rome, the British Empire, etc.—they all seem to follow roughly the same cycle. One would think that with that much historical perspective, we wouldn’t be doomed to repeat it, but human nature is a very strong thing to try to overcome. At the moment, it looks like the pendulum has swung back more toward the situation the country was in in the early 1900s, where most of the wealth was concentrated in large trusts and corporations and those entities had massive influence over lawmakers. The solution then was breaking that influence and imposing more regulation on banks and corporations as well as higher taxes on the upper end of the income scale (although the ‘real’ tax rate due to deductions, exemptions, etc. is somewhat debatable.) There’s some agitation for something similar to happen now. Will it happen? Will it help? For the sake of all those people I met in middle America, I do hope that something happens to make their lives better, and soon.
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On to happier topics: The national parks have been called “America’s best idea” (the title of the Ken Burns series about the parks), and I’d have to say that I agree. Setting aside and protecting some of the most beautiful landscapes and natural features in the world so that future generations will be able to see them is a remarkably prescient and selfless decision for an ostensibly capitalist society. There’s gold in them thar hills, but we’re not mining it in the parks, which is pretty awesome. Granted, there have been a few setbacks and missteps—Hetch Hetchy, some of the grazing and land use leases, the near-eradication of wolves, and so on—but overall, the parks are fantastic. I tended to favor the more remote and less visited parks over the more popular ones (I liked Capitol Reef a lot more than the Grand Canyon, for example), but even in the very touristy parks there were ample opportunities to get out into the back country. There are innumerable hiking trails and remote areas that are accessible to the brave and tenacious once you get away from the tour bus routes in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon, although admittedly a lot of the very popular attractions tend to get a little theme-parky due to the millions of visitors streaming through. Tips? Go on a weekday if you can. If you’re camping in a popular park, stake out your site early in the day and then come back to it when you’re ready to turn in. If you plan on visiting more than three or four parks in a year, get an annual pass. As the saying goes, “leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures.” Travel light. Be quiet. Look at everything. It’s a rare opportunity to get out into real wilderness, so take advantage of it while you still can.
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There are a few things that I would do differently if I were to do the trip over again, and they mostly have to do with documenting the trip. Being able to look back at the blog and the photos and remember the places I’ve been has been much more rewarding than I’d originally expected, so I think next time I will do a better job of that. I shot very little video, staying much more in the area of still photos…while I love the photos, there’s definitely something to be said for video as well, and since the camera I was taking pictures with also doubles as one of the better video cameras in the world, I didn’t have much of an excuse not to shoot a couple minutes of video of anything that I thought was good enough to take a picture of in the first place. Next time, there will be both. Similarly, most of my photos were of places, things, and landscapes. I took almost no photos of the people I met along the way, and that’s partly due to my discomfort with shoving a camera in somebody’s face. I need to get over that and take more pictures of the people I meet, since they’re such a big part of the experience (and to be honest, there aren’t that many people out there who react negatively to “can I take your picture?”, it’s just me being a wuss about it.) Lastly, I was not as diligent with route tracking throughout the trip as I was when I started. I began with a GPS app for my phone that recorded everything, but that turned out to kill the battery very quickly, so I quit using it in favor of Google Location Services. The problem with the Google thing is that it only works when you have a data connection, so it didn’t get a lot of the more remote stuff. And my old-school technique of marking my road atlas with a highlighter only worked when I remembered to do it, plus your average road atlas doesn’t have all the tiny little roads I traveled on. Having a detailed record of where you’ve been on a trip like this is great to be able to show other people, to jog your memory of places visited and people met, and to be able to find places again if you want to re-visit them. Next time, I will figure out some sort of always-on GPS-based solution and grab every foot of the route.
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So…what’s next? I will most definitely take another trip like this in the future, and probably more than one. I would not mind at all doing a western US/Canada trip in an off-road capable vehicle, as it would be great to get even farther into the outback in a lot of areas. I’m torn, though…for example, I’d love to do the drive up to Alaska in the Datsun, but by the same token there are some amazing areas on the way there that’d require an off-road vehicle to reach. The obvious solution is to take two trips and do it both ways, so maybe that’s the answer. I’d also like to do a trip like this overseas—as I mentioned in the video, driving the Datsun around Japan is going to happen at some point in the future, and a European version of the trip is most likely in the cards, too. I’ve got a lot of car prep between now and those trips though, and it’s likely I’ll have a fair amount of personal prep as well. I need to improve my Japanese language skills if I’m going to try to drive around Japan, for example. If I had to guess right now, I’d say I’ve got a year or two of a mix of preparation and some other non-trip projects to do before I take off again, but after that, we’ll be back on the road. I hope everybody comes along for the trip again, because we’ve got more exploring to do…