America 2005, Coast to Coast

After our trip to America back in 2002, it wasn’t long after we returned before there was murmurings of going back and seeing some different places. Slowly the idea formed of doing a road trip, but not just any road trip, the road trip…coast to coast.

Two of the guys who went on the last trip couldn’t commit to the holiday, so by 2004 it was seeming unlikely that it would go ahead. As Steve and I mentioned it to various people we knew though it turned out that some of them liked the idea as well…In the end my old school friend Dave and his partner Rachel didn’t take much convincing to come along.

A rough route was planned out across the southern states in early 2005 and then tweaked until we had something like a plan. Tickets were booked, a car sorted out and off we went for a three week trip in August 2005 which wound its way from Los Angeles, California all the way to Orlando, Florida.

These pages contain a brief account of the trip as well as selected photographs. The maps that you can see of each state show the actual route that our GPS logged as we drove around, with our final distance travelled coming to over 5,500 miles.

Overview Trail

A word of advice for anyone planning a similar trip—this was too far to try and go in three weeks, in my opinion. It’s not that we struggled to make the distance, but too many days consisted of getting up, checking out, driving for two hours, having a sandwich, driving for three more hours, finding a motel, eating a pizza then going to bed. This is a rubbish way to travel and there were a lot of places that we either drove straight past or slept in but didn’t really see. With hindsight we should have stayed in the same place for two nights on more occasions and given ourselves full days in places rather than an hour or so.

Also, Hollywood does seem to perpetuate a romanticised image of driving in America; with films like Kalifornia, Crossroads, Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise making the open road seem like the perfect holiday. In reality, although some places are nice to drive through, you still have to put up with other people’s shitty driving, poorly marked roads and often torrential rain. If you plan a trip like this try to avoid the interstates as much as possible, they’re straight, you can’t see anything from them and they’re boring to drive on!

I have also included a section at the end of photographs that Steve took. Since I’m not in many of my own photographs (and I took less candid ones than Steve!) I thought it would be nice to have some more group ones on here.