On The Road Again

Yes, it's been a long time, and my children are upset with me for failing to keep up my posts. Since the beginning of the month, however, I have been on the road.  I have just returned to California from Nantucket after a quick trip down to Washington, D.C., and then a 3200-mile drive across country from Nantucket with only a Labrador Retriever accompanying me. Driving six or seven hundred miles a day with a black Lab sleeping in the backseat, I was not in the proper frame of mind to blog about anything when I finally stopped for the night, and I’m afraid my mind is still mush.  I still feel a bit disoriented and unsettled after so much time behind the wheel, so much inedible road food, and so many uncomfortable beds, although I can't really complain for my trip was certainly much easier than that of the first intrepid drivers to go from coast to coast.

As I learned by chance several weeks ago in D.C., when I visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the first coast-to-coast trip by automobile was made in this country back in 1903 by Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall Crocker, who drove from San Francisco to New York City with a bulldog named Bud. They rode in an open two-seater touring car made by the Winton Motor Carriage Company in Cleveland, Ohio, with a two-cylinder, 20-horsepower engine beneath the driver’s seat that had a top speed of 30 miles per hour. Their trip took them 63 days, and at the time there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire country. There were no gas stations, either. They purchased fuel used for farm machinery from local general stores. Ken Burns has made a film for PBS about this cross-country journey, called “Horatio’s Drive: America's First Road Trip," and the car that was used is now on exhibit at the Smithsonian, where I saw it along with the goggles that were worn by Bud, the bulldog, who rode up in front and whose eyes were irritated by the dust rising around the open touring car.  

Of course,  Jackson, Crocker, and Bud never got stuck in rush hour traffic or found themselves boxed in by two eighteen wheelers, but I never had to drive on the tracks of a railroad trestle to cross a river, and I never got stuck in any buffalo wallows.  I don't even know what a wallow is.  Nor did I have to provide goggles for my dog, but, as I say, she was in the backseat, and she never complained.