With elderly parents I haven't seen for a while, and not wanting to risk exposure to Covid by traveling on a plane, I decided to do a marathon roadtrip from Colorado to Massachusetts. It ended up being just over 2,000 miles one-way.
I departed from my home at 5:00a, immediately wondering how far I could go in one day. Come to find out, I could go pretty far. I made it all the way to East Indianapolis - just over 1,100 miles. If I could have continued on, I would have, but coffee and Red Bulls were no longer effective against the onslaught of exhaustion, so I found a cheap roadside hotel to crash for a few hours. And I mean just a few. I checked in to my room just before midnight, and was back on the road before 5:00a.
Pulling into my parents' driveway in southeastern Massachusetts, I had completed my journey of over 2,000 miles in a total of 36 hours. The drive itself became an obsession. I was determined to beat the estimated arrival time on my phone's GPS. Each stop, whether for a bathroom break or refueling (the car, and me), was a race. It got so bad that I made it into a game: I gave myself only 5 minutes from the moment I started slowing down for the rest area to the time I was back on the road, up to normal speed. Certainly this can not be healthy.
My drive took me through Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Driving that far, in that short of time, is a bad idea. A really bad idea. It was incredibly difficult, particularly as a solo traveler.
For my trip home, I decided to split up the journey over three days, with two overnight stops. I departed Massachusetts at noon, and made it all the way to West Cleveland late that evening. A snowstorm was making the roads quite slick, so I figured I would pull over, book a cheap hotel on my phone's app, and get a few hours sleep. The heavy truck traffic on I-80 continued all the way across the midwest, and exhaustion brought me to another stop in Lincoln, NE. My route home took me through Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado.
I drove through 13 states. Many Americans have never even visited 13 states.
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