Road Trip

It was spring 2001, and I had accepted the job offer at Sun, so I was moving to California. I wanted to make the move special, i.e. I wanted to do a cross-country road trip since that was probably the only chance I could do it. The road trip would also be a chance for me to see the heartland of the United States. One problem, I couldn't drive, not to mention having a car. Turned out my suitemate, Nathan Dias (Nate) shared my interest; since he is from San Francisco, this was also a way for him to go back home. But he wasn't comfortable driving by himself. So we started to look for another person. By chance, when Nate was discussing the idea with one of his friends, Rich Serton, Daniel Kestin (Dan) overheard the conversation. Apparently, although Dan planned to stay in NYC, he had also wanted to do a road trip for fun, and he jumped in and offered to be the third person. Hence, the people problem was solved.

Now, we had to find a car. Given that we were college students, it had to be cheap. However, since we were doing a cross-country road trip, the car had to be reliable with relatively low miles (max 100,000). And since two of us were moving, it also had to fit quite a bit of stuff. The last requirement left out sedans. All of us were going to chip in for the car, and with that we could afford up to $4000. With that we started browsing online classifieds. This was in late April 2001, so we had about less than a month. We made a list of candidates, and one of them was a 1993 Plymouth Voyager (a van) having around 93,000 miles being sold in New Jersey. After making an appointment, Dan drove us to see the car. We liked it, and after taking it to a mechanic to make sure that the car could handle a cross-country trip, we bought it for $3000. Since the previous owner's name was Juan, we decided to name the car Juanito.

Dan and Nate took care of the registration. It was quite complicated, since we weren't planning to keep the car in New Jersey or New York State, but they got it done. But since we only had a temporary registration, we didn't have a proper license (this caused us to be pulled over in the early morning by a trooper in Maryland). We also went to the AAA to plan the route and get TripTiks. Each of us had a requirement on particular places to visit. I in particular wanted to drive on Route 66, stretching from Chicago to LA, as much as possible. And we had to fit it in two weeks. After sacrificing Atlanta and New Orleans, we came up with this route: NYC-Washington DC-Charlotte-Asheville-Nashville-Memphis-Chicago-St Louis-Kansas City-Oklahoma City-Amarillo-Santa Fe-Albuquerque-Flagstaff (with Grand Canyon)-Las Vegas-LA-SF.

A couple of days after commencement, we packed our stuff and set out for SF. On the day we left, we had been invited to a clam bake in Long Island by our mutual friend Bethe. But traffic on the Long Island Expressway was bad, and we had to miss that so that we could stick to our plan. So off we went! Of course, not everything could happen as planned, and we had to deal with that. We also had our fun and tense moments. It was a multicultural trip, Dan had a Jewish background, Nate's parents came from India, and I am an Indonesian of Chinese descent, so in those couple of weeks we had to adapt one another's idiosyncracies. On the way, we played the "state license plate" game, basically trying to see whether we could see the license plates from all 50 states on our trip. If I have time in the future I will include the details of the places we visited, but in the end we got to our destination still intact. We managed to see license plates from 49 states when we arrived in SF (can you guess which state's license plate we didn't see?*). It was a fun trip, and like wine, my impression of it becomes better as time goes on. And what happened to Juanito? We sold it in California (we actually made a profit out of it!).

* Rhode Island, but we still counted Dan's trip to his apartment in NYC as part of the road trip, and he saw one on the way there, so we won the game!