People might question (in fact, some have already) the logic of this. Summer is when everyone wants to go. Roadways are clogged with all manner of traveler and transportation and become stressful places, to say the very least. Even back in 1960, when our highly movable society was just getting underway, Steinbeck waited to take his road trip until after Labor Day, "when millions of kids would be back in school and tens of millions of parents would be off the highways."
Since then, that highly movable society has only become faster moving and, it may be argued quite strongly, more impatient, ruder and stress-producing than ever. It's also true (historically) that gas prices drop after Labor Day, although that doesn't seem to be as reliable a bet as it once was.
In any case, yes, within the dull, drab discipline of logic it makes sense to wait. But I will be craving (and in some ways relying on) the energy of summer on this trip - the heat, the light, the storms, the fragrance, long days and short nights...each a unique but critical part of a burgeoning whole. As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing in this great land of ours, nothing on this planet, that looks, smells or tastes better in winter than in summer (this includes pancakes with syrup and hot chocolate...). And the last thing I'm going to want to feel on any leg of this journey is so much as a breath of fall in the air, until, perhaps, the very end.
Fall is the time to come home. It is not the time to leave. My entire life, May - graduation time - has been the time to leave. It is when I've been most assaulted by longing, felt most despairing (or at least dissatisfied) for having roots.
There's a significant downside to summer travel however - beyond traffic, but related nevertheless. Summer's when the orange barrels are in full bloom along roadsides; that is, construction season comes into full swing. Every year, select city streets, county roads and state highways across the nation get torn up section by section, resurfaced or replaced, a ponderous process that creates one-lane bottlenecks that have a way of reducing traffic to a crawl or a standstill, and/or detours that draw motorists miles out of the way, for weeks on end.
When you're not going anywhere besides to work or the grocery store, or if you're on a road trip with a very finite beginning and end, road construction amounts to little more than an inconvenience. But I'm planning to leave May 15 and stay out until October 1. '1 road trip through 48 states in under 50 years' will translate into four or five months of endless highway time and countless highways, which means being stuck in a construction bottleneck could very easily become a daily or twice daily occurrence, depending on how many miles I want to cover.
And that won't do.
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The orange construction barrel is a perennial weed found in all 50 states,
throughout Canada and the world. It blooms from May to October
along roadsides and in ditches, on highway overpasses and on city street corners. |
Sadly, there's no way to avoid construction completely. Roads everywhere break down, crack up, get pitted and pot-holed, are in need of almost yearly repair. Worse even than a bottleneck is the dreaded detour. I hate detours. I don't know why, but I have a weird compulsion to stay on course that I know runs against any 'feather in the wind' ideal, but which I've never been able to shake entirely. I hate being told I have to go in a different direction from the one I was expecting to go, and I especially hate backtracking. And while I hope to be a feather in the wind at least a little bit on 1/48/50 (because something would be missing without some of that...), I do have a basic route in mind, and I'm not going to want to deviate too much, because there are things I'm going to want to see; I won't be just meandering aimlessly. And while it's true detours usually keep you going in the same basic direction, they can turn into a major pain in the ass, a source of stress all their own, when you're not from the area.
I wonder if road construction is heavier in the northern tier of states than the southern, on account of winter. It would have to be, I think, and yet maybe the deep south's blistering summertime heat and humidity take their toll as well. Ultimately, what really punishes roadways are all those vehicles rushing along, day in day out. So wherever this trip takes me, there's no question I'm going to have to be prepared to stop, wait, and go out of my way more than once.
To combat this (and feel like I've begun 'planning' a trip that's still years off), I spent a little time searching for some kind of on-line construction tracker, an app for my phone that compiles and continuously updates road construction status state-by-state. How could that not exist, right? Well, there appear to be road CONDITION apps available, but nothing dealing with construction specifically. And the closest I've come to such an umbrella on the Internet is the Federal Highway Administration website, but they seem to deal mainly with the Interstates, and as much as possible I want to avoid them on 1/48/50. The two-lane roads I've (mostly) plotted my course along are much harder to account for. (County Road Y in Bumblebutt, Wherever doesn't get a lot of action on any given day, I imagine...). I'm usually sent to individual state sites for the smaller, lesser traveled routes. Of these, some are more comprehensive than others, but most provide at least a short list of construction projects. Just not all in one place.
This app so needs to happen.
I guess when the time comes, I simply won't sweat it. If I get balled up in traffic outside of Bumblebutt now and then, I'll just have to be thankful that I'm balled up in traffic outside of Bumblebutt, rather than sitting at home.
That's at the very heart of a restless streak: being willing to take anywhere, anywhere at all - even Bumblebutt, Wherever - over where you are currently.
