A Travel Writer Drves Cross-Country

May 20, 2012— -- According to a recent survey by Expedia, a majority of Americans have always wanted to do a cross-country road trip but haven't yet.

Ever since the publication of Jack Kerouac's On The Road over 50 years ago, and probably since the first wagon train rumbled west, the notion of driving from one coast to the other has been part of the American psyche. And with airfares creeping (some would say catapulting) upwards, and TSA hassles getting more burdensome, I hear from readers of this column and subscribers to the Airfarewatchdog newsletters that they're willing to drive ever-longer distances to avoid flying, even if it turns out that driving costs more. Which it often does, as I found out on a recent mid-May joy ride from New York to Los Angeles.

There were two of us in the car. One-way fares were running anywhere from $150 to $500 including tax, depending on the day. But we were also carrying some cargo, much of it precious and irreplaceable—the kind of stuff -- "valuables" as the airline contracts of carriage call them -- that no airline, or indeed, any moving company, would ever take responsibility for in the event of loss or damage. Plus, we needed to move a car eventually to L.A., and it was either drive it ourselves or put it on a truck at considerable extra expense. So there was that.

But enough about economics for now.

What's it like driving from one end of the USA to the other?

I'd never driven more than 500 miles in a day, and consider even the trek from New York to Boston, a distance of 225 or so miles, burdensome and a bit boring. And I'm well aware that gas costs over $4.00 a gallon, and that my car only gets 26 miles per gallon on the highway. Every fill-up was going to cost about $80, and there were going to be five or six of those. Add meals and hotels and get out the calculator. So even divided between two people this was going to be expensive, although exactly how much more expensive than flying would prove surprising.

So what was it like? In a word, fun. We headed out from Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel toward Pittsburgh (we were tempted, as we passed, to visit the Flight 93 Memorial, which we had seen on a previous trip and still isn't quite finished, but motored on) and found our way to I-70, an east-west ribbon of asphalt and concrete that would be our magic carpet across the USA.

We stopped the first night in Columbus, Ohio, home to Jeni's Ice Creams, arguably the country's best. Being a native Bostonian, I'd always thought that Toscanini Ice Cream in Cambridge, Mass., was the be-all-end-all, but Jeni's is of a higher order.

Equally impressive was the city's beautifully-restored German Village section, with some of the most unusual residential architecture I've ever seen. We stayed in a guest house called, appropriately, the German Village Guest House. I highly recommend it. Columbus was a pleasant surprise.