CHAPTER ONE
“THE GREAT AMERICAN ROAD TRIP”
The lure of a road trip beckons hardest in Spring. Flower blooms and crisp air, sunny days and shimmering tarmac, it all begs for a drive, any drive, to anywhere. Like the pull of a lusty sundress, a springtime drive enchants with irresistible curves, power, and curiosity. Americans, a people who created world’s largest collection of paved roads, all 4.2 million miles of them, relish every milepost. We cruise an estimated 3 trillion miles each year, rambling along in our cherished machines. We eat in our cars; talk in our cars; do business in our cars; text, read, gossip, listen to music, apply makeup, and have sex in our 298 million cars. Sometimes we even drive them.
The cross-country road trip remains the ultimate American expression of freedom, exploration, challenge, and escape. From the days of the Conestoga and wagon train to today’s triple-trailer mega-trucks barreling through the night guided by GPS ad caffeine, Americans traverse the continent with vigor, for work, for love, for adventure, and for life itself. Anyone with a decent set of wheels and a few weeks to spare has felt the call of the highway, the interstate, the quiet county farm-to-market, and the red dirt road. A nation built by immigrants, risk-taking and wanderlust make up the national conscious. The love of a road trip remains as American as reality television and the 55-inch waistline.
There’s so much to see. Drive east-west across England and the topography may rise and fall a bit, and you may blow through a few micro-climates, but you won’t cross desserts, massive mountain ridges, mighty rivers, great plateaus and plains, and soaring vistas. Our three coasts contain a vast array of scenery and the sheer size of the United States make a road trip here a rich visual venture.
My 15,000-mile great American road trip began in failure. In 2008, I founded Motorpool.com, the world’s first social-networking site for classic car enthusiasts. The idea was simple enough: create Facebook for car buffs. A year of programming later, we’d created a site where car buffs could show off their rides, meet one another, ask questions about each other’s cars and plan their own road trips. Having worked for 15 years in media for such publications as Forbes, Vanity Fair, and Southern Living, I thought publicizing my new venture would be a snap. Write a press release, make a few phone calls, and my morning segment on Fox and Friends would be waiting. I pressed “send” on the email press release and waited. And waited. Then I called. And got exactly one local article in my hometown business journal. Jerks. No wonder people hated us in the media, I thought.
A few weeks after launching Motorpool to friends and family, with just a hundred users, I sat bolt upright in bed. We’re a company about cars, I thought. The car is the star. Two words flashed across my brain: “road trip.”
When the going gets tough, the tough hit the road. Forget this new-age crap about “viral networks” and “Twitterati” promoting new companies in cyberspace. I was going to promote Motorpool the old-fashioned way–take the story to the road, meet the customers face-to-face. Hucksterism on the highway. I’d take to the tarmac in a classic car, visit a major media market in every state, and promote Motorpool in hand-to-wheel combat. I’d give my journalist friends, those bastards, a peg to hang a story on. All stories need a peg. And what a better story than a new entrepreneur promoting a 21st-century technology by pounding the pavement in a 1958 Cadillac?
I began drawing up plans to cover every state in a three-month journey. My circuitous route would begin in my home state of Alabama, head north towards Main, then west to Chicago, south to Texas, west to California, north towards Seattle, southeast to New Orleans, a dash through Florida and the Carolinas, then back home. All told, 85 days, 15,000 miles, 48-states, and 58 major media markets. What could go wrong?
Little did I know the road would nearly break me.