Having grown up in the jet age with beloved maps and cherished road trips, I enjoyed travel both by air and by surface. Months before my Bar Mitzvah, during the trip for my Uncle Ray's funeral, I noticed that the quick flight across the country left me feeling like I'd missed out on the sense of distance we'd really traveled. Though I had hundreds of miles of imagery in my head of California landscape, I felt like the rest of the country was a blur. I was left wanting to know the landscape of the country between the the distant airports of San Francisco, Chicago, and Tampa. I wanted, in essense, to connect the dots by road.
Later, commuting between parents in California and my adult life (starting with college) in Massachusetts, I ended up changing planes at a variety of airline hubs across the country expanding my sense of the country as a set of disconnected oases or dots.
One Christmastime, when my brother Cliff had just gotten his drivers license, I noticed a good car for sale for a low price in a parking lot at school. It was a 79 Honda Accord. I bought it, and with colleague Frank Bronzo drove across the country in it with the intent of selling it to Cliff. Frank had never previously been west of the Hudson River, so he signed on for the adventure in spite of having, as a new employee of BBN to negotiate the time off before he had earned it.
With a loosely organized plan, and a speedometer that broke the day before we set out, we drove to Maine to pick up maple syrup to use as gifts along the trip. We then drove to Washington, where we did a half-day tour of the national capitol, followed by a long day's drive across Virginia, Tennessee, and part of Alabama, where we struggled to find a night's lodging. The next night we arrived for a couple of days in New Orleans, graceously hosted by a friend of a friend. On Christmas Eve, we drove through Houston to Austin, spending Christmas with my Aunt Bernice and Uncle Jerry. From there we drove all day to escape Texas (we made quick stop at the Johnson Ranch), reaching the border (we crossed the bridge for thirty seconds in Ciudad Juarez Mexico!) and finding a motel in Las Cruces NM. The next morning brought us across the Continental divide on Interstate 10, to reach Tucson in time to visit the Pima Air Museum. Later that evening, we drove across the desert to Yuma, where we found another motel. In the morning, we crossed the Jordan -err- Colorado into the promised land of California, and out to the coast at San Diego. We stayed with my childhood neighbors, the Babers, for a couple of days, so Frank could take in Sea World and the zoo. We then drove to Los Angeles to Spend New Years Eve with friends Mike Simpson and Jim Kilbourne. New Years Day, we drove up US 101 to San Jose, where we hooked up with my family. After the obligatory drive into San Francisco to wrap-up the transcontinental journey, we turned the car over to my dad and flew back to Boston. He sold it for a couple of hundred more than I paid, leaving my cross-country driving experience a completely pleasant memory. (Cliff still could use a good car though...)
During college, I took flying lessons. At the end of my first summer of flight training, my flight instructor Andrew and I flew his Piper Arrow III out to California. It was due for annual inspection, and Andrew wanted to use his mechanic at El Monte. We ended up flying by way of Baltimore (BWI), Clarksburg WV, Crawfordsville IN, Wichita KS (ICT), Gallup NM, Flagstaff AZ (nice town, too bad I was ill), and onto El Monte CA (EMT), in the Los Angeles area. The return flight was via Brackett (picking up a radio), Corona (cheap fuel), and Riverside CA (weather briefing), thence to Prescott AZ, where we spent the night. Northern Arizona is spectacular from a 9500 foot altitude. The lunch stop was Dalhart TX, and dinner was back at Wichita KS. We spent a short night at Dayton OH, from which we jumped into foul weather for the trip back to Bedford MA.
A subsequent flying tour with friend Bill Meyer left us grounded at Knoxville due to weather. I had previously passed through Knoxville on the drive to New Orleans described above. We rented a car and drove to Atlanta, where Aunt Bernice and Uncle Jerry had moved. The weather continued to thwart the intended round-the-country flight in Bill's Cessna 172, so I had him drop me off on his way back to Chicago in Indianapolis, where I was able to get the cheapest flight back to Boston. [Oh wow, I just remembered a fueling stop I have failed to account for in southern Indiana; this will prove a challenge.] Again, I was left with all these spots on the map, and I realized I wanted to connect them up by surface travel, starting dot-to-dot in earnest.
A road-trip with some friends to a wedding (re-enactment--they actually eloped!) in Indianapolis brought me a baseline into the mid-west, and is the earliest trip where I remember driving to the airport specifically to connect the dot. A couple of business trips to Kansas City area (they sent me to Leavenworth) became the jumping-off point for bridging from Indy to Chicago and Denver. Side-trips from other business trips brought me to northern Michigan, and out to Minneapolis. A vacation drive took me from Atlanta down to Tampa (Grandma's 95th birthday in St Pete), Key West, up I-95 all the way to Raleigh, and back to Atlanta, with preemptive visits to Greensboro and Charlotte airports. A side-trip from visiting my dad and step-mom in Tucson took me through Prescott and Gallup. The view from my flight with Andrew during the Wichita-to-Gallup leg left me wanting to drive US-54, which I did on my Kansas City to Denver trip for my cousin Peter's wedding. A side-trip on a recent visit to my cousin Jane in St Louis connected Memphis, a long-standing dot-to-dot challenge.
Aside from the above newly remembered Indiana dot, and the Los Angeles area (Andrew errand) dots and one or two in New England, the dot-to-dot game is now about to grow off-continent. Paris and London need to be connected to my European mainline, running from Amsterdam and Antwerp through Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich. Europe needs to be connected (via ship!) with Israel and North America. New Zealand and Hawaii need to be connected back to North America too. Then I can cross the Tasman Sea and explore Australia. Eventually, I want to explore the western Pacific, connecting dots from Sydney to Hong Kong to Tokyo. South Africa, South America and the Antarctic are also on the list. There is much fun and exciting travel yet to do, and I imagine dot-to-dot will continue to take me on trips and adventures that I would otherwise never think to try. How do you choose where to travel?
$Date: 1998/08/14 04:26:10 $ (GMT)