We started the road trip hoping to write a book about our travels, but realized it was a feeble attempt, considering how many people had beaten us on this path.
Thousands of people, motorcycle fleets, paraplegics, cyclists and Americana enthusiasts drive along the "Main Street of America" yearly.

When we had dinner at the Ariston Café in Litchfield, Ill., also known as the oldest restaurant on the route, we signed the traveler's guestbook, a tradition for all visitors stopping by on their way to Santa Monica. The delightful owner showed us tons of books, albums and memorabilia collected through the years from travelers he had befriended.

It was an incredible thing, feeling like we were living history.

Route 66, established in 1926, represented a pioneer journey into the American West. It was the novel idea of two business men, Cyrus Avery and John Woodruff, to forge an economic and industrial link from Chicago to Los Angeles, but it was the 1939 novel, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, that turned this "super highway" into a cultural icon.

It seemed life imitated art, when soon after the book and film were released, more than 200,000 people followed in the footsteps of the Joad family and escaped the Dust Bowl of the Midwest, migrating to the land of perfect weather and beaches. Since then, the route has been associated with a certain independent spirit and opportunity-a fearlessness and embracing of the unknown.

We felt this spirit while we were driving through the shanty towns of Missouri, past the green fields of Kansas, and illegally running the tollbooths of Oklahoma with nothing ahead of us except for miles and miles of blue skies and breathtaking clouds (New Mexico!)

 

The funny thing was, we didn’t plan for the trip at all. Besides a map book that we never learned to read and a Route 66 book that turned out to be useless, we had no idea where or what we were going to do each day. The only thing we were certain of, was that the rental car had to be returned to Hertz by noon eight days later.

 

Connie and I had never embarked on such a journey before-we both admitted that we were pretty certain we were going to give up or fail... get a flat tire, kill someone in a hit and run, get car sick, etc... there were myriad worst-case scenarios that thankfully, never came into fruition.

We laughed for hours, sometimes for days at a time, at things that I no longer recall, but will spend the rest of my life trying to. Weeks later, we reminisce about our trip and think about how the fear of the unknown made the adventure. The fact that we didn't know we were going to make it made the journey so much more appealing. We were, as Aerosmith aptly croons, "living on the edge."

So why do we travel?

In a travel essay, Amr El Beleidy writes,

"The more we travel, the more uncertain we become. But it is precisely this uncertainty that can show us what we are certain of. And it is this core of certainty that makes us who we are... When we travel, we are forced to leave some things. But we cannot possibly know what will be left and what we will carry for eternity. And so we leave to find out what we cannot leave behind."

I love this idea. I'm not sure if his words would fit into traditional travel psychology, but I think that travel forces us to leave things-to challenge ourselves to still function, thrive and enjoy life without familiar comforts or our daily routines.

Travel teaches you about yourself and your companions in the most extraordinary ways. For example, the subjectiveness of "roughing it," the impossibility of not getting lost every hour, and the art of waking Connie without her screaming at me.

When you travel, you never stop learning.

In seven days, we learned how to navigate a freak rainstorm in Missouri, how to get pulled over by a horny cop in Oklahoma City without committing a crime, how to go into near cardiac arrest while trying to eat a 18 oz. steak in Texas, how poverty and racism collide firsthand in Gallup and how to capture the color of our auras in Sedona.

Perhaps, my schooling will come to an end this winter, but I am thankful my education never will.

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