Today is the day!

My US road trip Covid-edition 2020 from New York to California officially began at 6:15am today! The real plan was to leave at 5:30am to miss all the city traffic but you know what they say about best laid plans and all that…

My car is packed (and not full to the brim either in case you were wondering). I have extra toilet paper on hand because the new ‘rona uptick is probably still making people hoard it. Water, snacks, a cooler full of various no-need-to-heat lunch items, enough baby carrots and hummus to make it to at least Wyoming, and an obligatory bag of Krave beef jerky (because it’s a road trip, duh).

My fancy new graduation gift camera is primed and ready to roll. Hopefully I’ll have some dope pictures to share with you all soon - fingers crossed we spot some buffalo within (picture) shooting distance in Custer State Park! But also I’ll probably have some standard touristy photos - think the ‘bean’ in Chicago. And some weird shots too - there is apparently the world’s only Corn Palace, made entirely out of corn, in South Dakota - why on Earth there would need to be more than one I’m not quite sure of.

Really I feel like I’ve been planning for this moment my whole life. Okay, hella dramatic, I know, but I’m hyped up on caffeine so hear me out.

I’ve always loved maps; which if you’ve ever tried to plan a cross country road trip in a Tesla with limited mileage range is something you better have some kind of affinity for. Old maps in particular just look cool and they’re obviously bound to lead you to some sort of buried treasure. Boring old atlas maps though, which I haven’t laid a finger on in years, were things I used on the regular as a kid when my Mom and I went on road trips to dance competitions in weird-to-prononunce towns in New Jersey and up and down the East Coast.

Researching things is actually fun for me, especially when it comes to traveling. I love looking up new places and figuring out the cool things to do that are a mix of super touristy (like taking a ride on the London Eye) and true oddities (like venturing into a subterranean reservoir in Houston), finding unique foods to eat and ‘the best’ of its kind across various cities (like Peking duck in Beijing or lampredotto in Florence, even though I was totally not a fan of the latter), and checking out cool neighborhoods with tons of graffiti art, live music on every corner, or just picturesque scenes that you literally cannot find anywhere else in the world.

I’m also really great at planning things, probably because I have what some might consider a little too much love for to do lists and perfectly formatted Excel spreadsheets. I literally have every stop on this road trip adventure both big and small mapped out in a custom list in Google Maps (see below for proof). I also have every Tesla supercharger from here to California mapped out in a similar way just to make sure I don’t get stuck in bumblefuck with a dead battery and no cell service, but that is probably a story for another post.