Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily Post, ... kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant
Bloomsbury Publishing
July 2006
256 pages ISBN: 1582345279 Hardcover Add to Wish List
From the bestselling author of Rats, a personal
and national history of one of America's
favorite pastimes: driving across the country.
The cross-country trip is the trip that often whizzes past
us on our way to quaint back roads and scenic parks; it's an
America of long, looping highways, strip malls, fast-food
depots, and road rage, but also one that is wide-open,
awe-inspiring, and heartwarmingly lonely. Here, Sullivan,
who has driven cross-country more than two dozen times,
recounts his family's annual summer migration from Oregon to
New York. His story of moving his family back and forth from
the East Coast to the West Coast (and various other
migrations), is replete with all the minor disasters, humor,
and wonderful coincidences that characterize life on the
road, not to mention life.
As he drives, Sullivan ponders his nation-crossing
predecessors, such as legendary duo Lewis and Clark, as well
the more improbable heroes of America's unending urge to
cross itself: Carl Fisher, an Indianapolis bicycle maker who
founded the Indy 500, dropped cars off of buildings and
imagined the first cross-country road; Emily Post, who,
before her life as an etiquette writer, was one of the first
cross-country chroniclers; and the race car drivers who,
appalled by the invention of seatbelts and speed limits, ran
an underground cross-country car race in the 1970s known as
the Cannonball Run. Sullivan meets Beat poets who are
devotees of Jack Kerouac, cross-country icon, and plays golf
on an abandoned coal mine. And, in his trademark celebration
of the mundane, Sullivan investigates everything from the
history of the gas pump to the origins of fast food and rest
stops. Cross Country tells the tales that come from
fifteen years of driving across the country (and all around
it) with two kids and everything that two kids and two
parents take when driving in a car from one coast to
another, over and over, driving to see the way the road made
America and America made the road.
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