For years I’ve been lobbying my husband to drive with me across the country—specifically, to start in Provincetown and take Route 6 all the way to California. But the trip we took late this summer was better: a meandering almost-three-week journey with no set itinerary and no scheduled stops except for two nights on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was a trip of 7,650 miles, 398 gallons of gas, 141.5 hours of driving (in a GMC pickup), 22 states, one speeding ticket, one warning, five national parks, one state park, a couple of national monuments, one oil change, and one very scary snowstorm. When we left Harvard at the end of August, all that was ahead of us; our only plan that day was to get somewhere we’d never been before, which turned out to be:

Wheeling, W.V.

Heavy fog blanketed the Ohio River waterfront early Saturday morning, Aug. 30, but the third annual Wheeling Vintage Raceboat Regatta was happening anyway. One block from a sleepy Main Street that had clearly seen better days, Wheeling’s waterfront park was bustling with volunteers in fluorescent orange T-shirts, greeting racing crews and preparing for the large crowd they hoped would materialize by the 10 a.m. opening ceremony. Sleek racing boats—one of which held a record of 151 mph—sat on trailers, waiting to be lifted into the river by one of two huge cranes towering over them. The weather forecast was good, and sure enough, the sun came out and a sizeable crowd gathered in time for the start. My new friend Barbara, whom I met while we stood admiring the park’s memorial to legendary labor leader and Wheeling native Walter Reuther, has been racing boats for decades and had driven all the way from Chagrin Falls, Ohio for this regatta. Her racing friends are “a very special group of people,” she said, and she never misses this event if she can help it. At least I think that’s what she said: it was nearly impossible to hear Barbara over the deafening high-pitched whine of racing boats rocketing around the course out there on the otherwise placid Ohio. I asked Barbara if it was ever possible to get used to the noise, but she couldn’t hear me, either.

Collinsville, Ill.

After driving for hours through the cornfields of Indiana and Southern Illinois, exit 11 off Interstate 70 in Collinsville was a gateway to another planet. It’s a man-made version of what I expected to find at the Grand Canyon: a place where a cataclysmic event had occurred—in this case, a commercial explosion of epic proportions. We learned that Collinsville had been a coal-mining town in the 1870s, and that there had been a cowbell factory there. Present-day area attractions include the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle and the Cahokia Mounds, which a brochure called the largest prehistoric city north of Mexico. But as we pulled off the exit ramp on the outskirts of town, here’s what we saw: a Fairfield Inn, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn, Ponderosa Steakhouse, Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesdays, Days Inn, Papa John’s, Fazzi’s Bar and Restaurant, El Rancherito Authentic Mexican Restaurant, Porter’s Steakhouse, Bob Evans Family Restaurant, Bandana’s, Arby’s, Super 8 motel, Ravanelli’s, Steak ’n Shake, White Castle, Burger King, Dairy Queen, Pizza Hut, the Drury Inn, and the Leisure World Health Club. I’m not kidding when I say that all of this was packed into a space roughly equivalent to the distance between Dunkin’ Donuts on Ayer Road and the Appleworks, and that as exit ramps go, that’s about as bad as it gets.

St. Louis, Mo.

The massive arch that marks the “gateway to the west” in St. Louis is not a place I would normally visit, but the welder in the family wanted to see how it was made, so Sunday morning found us standing in line under the arch, high above the lazy Mississippi, waiting to go through metal detectors at the entrance to what was an unexpectedly good museum. The aim of the exhibits was to convey a sense of the hardships westward-bound settlers endured in a time before interstate highways and exit 11s—a time when families crowded into creaky wagons, rode horses, or walked the route we were about to take. It was inspiring and very humbling to see the wagons and cooking utensils they used and to read excerpts from letters they sent back home. One passage in particular seemed timeless—a pioneer’s description of what he called “the American character” asserting itself among his fellow travelers. “Everybody wants to govern,” he wrote; “nobody wants to be governed.”

Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas

For anybody who grew up loving cowboy movies, as I did, the pull of Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas is nearly irresistible. And so we spent a night in Abilene, then cut southwest across Kansas—through rolling hills and wind-swept fields of feed corn and sorghum stretching to the horizon—to Dodge City, where my companion hoped, at the very least, for a good gunfight reenactment. While Abilene today appears well-worn but very comfortable with itself, Dodge City comes across as a gritty little town living wistfully in the shadow of its colorful past. Boot Hill is still there, rising bleakly behind a not-very-convincing replica of the street we remember from Wyatt Earp movies, and a few poor souls are still buried there, although most of the graves have long since been moved. I expected a bigger town—maybe even a city—and was happy to see that Dodge still looks like a tough little outpost, though not nearly as tough as it once was. And I was glad we had made the trip, because now we were on I-50, well south of I-70, and we were getting a real feel for the heartland.

Pueblo, Colo.

It was Tuesday, we were finally in Colorado, and I was actually going to see the Rocky Mountains instead of flying over them at 30,000 feet. But the mountains didn’t just suddenly appear, looming huge and awesome in the distance as I imagined they would; instead, on our southern route we climbed steadily, but not visibly, until just past Pueblo, when we were undeniably in the mountains I had longed to see. The sky was blue, the vistas were magnificent, and the red pen I was holding exploded as we crossed Monarch Pass at 11,300 feet, which meant that I went into the next restroom we saw with blood-red hands and noticed that other women stayed well clear. It was certainly beautiful, but what I remember most fondly about Colorado was Officer John Ferguson, an amiable cop who stopped us for doing 46 mph in a 40-mph zone in Grand Junction and let us off with a warning, directions, and helpful advice about our route through Utah. Officer Ferguson was a welcome change from the Kansas state trooper who had nailed us for $110 (76 mph in a 65-mph zone) the day before, just short of the Colorado line.

Grand Canyon North Rim

There are simply no words to describe the Grand Canyon, so I won’t even try. What I can say is that it made me feel sick—headachy, skin-crawly, weak-in-the-knees sick. It wasn’t just the altitude, either; I felt really good in the gift shop, and even better in the restaurant. Nope, my troubles began after we got to our lovely little cabin at the North Rim Lodge about 4 p.m., made reservations for dinner, and set out to Bright Angel Point, a short half-mile walk. With my first real look at that astounding abyss—so gorgeous and terrifying in the late afternoon sun—I understood that I could no more walk out to that point than fly there. It was disappointing to think that I had come all that way and could not manage the last quarter mile. But I was not alone in my terror, and took grim pleasure in observing other tortured souls groping their way out to one lookout or another, clinging frantically to a railing, if there was one, or to the rock face, if there wasn’t. Mostly I observed them from the rock-solid safety of the lodge balcony, while listening to a park ranger explain the natural forces that had created this wonder and that continue to modify it to this day. At the lecture’s end, when it was time for questions, all I really wanted to know was how many people fall into the canyon each year, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. (Not too many, I later learned, but a man did fall from Bright Angel Point last August.)

Oatman, Ariz.

Dinnertime in Oatman, Arizona. (Courtesy photo by Bryce Larrabee)

Driving to Oatman on old Route 66 (now designated as an historic route) is really a trip in itself. The narrow roadway twists and turns through the mountains of southwestern Arizona for 20 miles west of Kingman, and it’s hard to believe that this was once the main route to the West Coast. The scruffy little town of Oatman was once a mining town and there is still a gold mine there, closed since the 1990s and now surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire. Since October 1952, when the “new” Route 66 opened and bypassed the town by a long shot, Oatman has gradually turned into a tourist attraction, a town that really looks like we expected Dodge City to look, right down to the dusty streets, wooden sidewalks, and prospectors’ burros wandering the streets. We pulled into town just after 5 p.m., when most of the stores had closed, but the town watering hole was still open and maybe a dozen burros were hanging around outside waiting for someone to give them a carrot. Descendants of work animals abandoned by early prospectors, the burros are now protected by the Federal Bureau of Land Management. They reportedly wander around town during the day and go back into the hills at night, and seem reasonably comfortable around people, cars, and even motorcycles, of which there were a number parked outside the saloon. They apparently also feel welcome in the stores, but the feeling is not always mutual; we saw one shopkeeper chasing one out with a squirt bottle.

Hoover Dam

Did you know that the water in Lake Mead would cover the entire state of Pennsylvania to a depth of one foot? That’s the kind of thing you can learn on a tour of the Hoover Dam, but not the only thing. If, like me, you’ve always been a little fuzzy about how electricity is made, you can learn about that, too, and you can also see that an awful lot is riding on the snowpack in the Rockies. The dam itself is an engineering marvel, and much is made of the fact that it was completed two years ahead of schedule and well under budget at $165 million. Since 1936, it has been providing irrigation for more than a million acres of productive farmland in the Southwest and nearly a half-million in Mexico; domestic water for the cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, and others; and low-cost hydroelectric power for much of Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California.

We took a tour of the dam, which I wouldn’t recommend for anybody with claustrophobia. First, it involves getting on a crowded elevator and going way, way down into the bowels of the dam, then walking through damp tunnels to a room housing the giant generators. It was very cool down there, though, or at least much cooler than the 104 degrees outside. At the end of the tour, we went up to an observation deck where we could look down on the water being released after its job was done, and you could have fried an egg on the railing around that deck.

Antelope Island State Park, Utah

We spent hours driving through Utah, first through the rugged canyons of southern Utah on the way to the Grand Canyon, and then northward on I-15 from Nevada through Salt Lake City and up into Idaho. But our only stops were at Bryce Canyon and at Antelope Island State Park, just north of Salt Lake City. My goal there was to stand in the Great Salt Lake, which turned out to be more difficult than expected. There had been a drought and the lake was very low. So to get to the water, we had to walk across a wide stretch of hard-packed salt flat on a very hot day, which made the lake much more inviting than it might otherwise have been. In any case, if you believe that salt water has curative powers, which I do, then the Great Salt Lake, with salinity levels ranging between 4 and 28 percent (compared to the ocean at 3 percent) should have worked wonders for my aging extremities. There’s no evidence of that yet, but maybe these things take time.

Got a nickle? (Courtesy photo by Bryce Larrabee)

Yellowstone

Following the beautiful Snake River from Idaho, we rolled into Yellowstone National Park in the late afternoon. Established as the nation’s—and the world’s—first national park in 1872, Yellowstone encompasses more than 2 million acres of geysers, lakes, rivers, forests, mountains, canyons, hiking trails, campgrounds, and a couple of venerable resort hotels. It’s also crawling with wildlife, and this is one place where the animals pretty much make the rules. Ubiquitous signs along park roads warn of wildlife on the road ahead and they are not kidding: around the next corner there may well be a herd of bison crossing the road or just standing there like a shaggy brown wall. The bison are in no hurry to go anywhere, and there is nothing to do but just wait for them to move. Like all park visitors, we’d been amply warned not to approach the animals, but there was nothing to stop them from approaching us, and very little we could do to get out of their way. Even in a truck, it’s humbling to be surrounded by bison, especially when a huge male the size of a small house stops an arm’s-length away and stares balefully through the window. Does he hate blue? Is there an annoying reflection from our windshield? We can only wait for the verdict and thank heaven we’re not on a motorcycle.

We stayed two days in Yellowstone and were lucky to get the last available cabin in the park, near the sprawling old Lake Yellowstone Hotel. The bison were there, too, grazing around the cabin as we slept.

Beartooth Pass

Leaving Yellowstone in a steady rain, we headed for Montana and the Little Bighorn battlefield. But to get there we had to cross the mountains by way of 11,947-foot Beartooth Pass. The higher we climbed, the colder it got as the temperature dropped steadily from the high 40s to 32 degrees at the summit. We were in clouds by then, the rain had turned to sleet and then snow, and it was very quiet in the truck as we crept blindly through a series of treacherous switchback turns. Finally we were at the top, and on a better day we could have seen forever. But on this day, all we could see was a “speed limit 75 mph” sign, plastered with snow, which proves that somebody on the road crew has a mordant sense of humor.

Little Bighorn

Seventh Cavalry Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s ignominious defeat at the hands of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors near the Little Bighorn River in June 1876 is an intriguing—and unfortunately timeless—story of hubris run amok. The battlefield today, with its fine museum of artifacts and even-handed review of the events leading up to the battle, is well worth the effort it takes to get there. It was still raining hard when we arrived, so we passed up a walking tour of the monuments marking places where more than 260 soldiers and 60 to a 100 warriors fell in the two-day engagement. But even so, the haunting story of the battle and of the tragic events that came before and afterward, will be hard to forget.

Crazy Horse Memorial

After leaving the Little Bighorn battlefield, it seemed important to see the memorial to Oglala Lakota Chief Crazy Horse, one of the leaders in that battle, that is being carved out of a mountain in South Dakota, not far from Mount Rushmore. The memorial is privately funded and has been in the works since 1948; when it is finished, it will depict the legendary chief astride his horse, with his left arm outstretched, pointing toward the land that was brutally taken from his people: the Black Hills of South Dakota. Only his face in profile is identifiable now, but it’s already evident that this memorial will be far more imposing than Mount Rushmore, small consolation as that may be.

The Badlands, Corn Palace, and other stuff

I’d been anxious to see the Badlands in South Dakota, but by the time we got there we were getting tired of traveling and ready to go home. Still, rising out of the flat plains around them, the spiky, convoluted buttes and gullies of the Badlands look sinister enough to warrant a closer look. But at the first parking area we came to, there was a warning sign about rattlesnakes, and that was the end of that.

Farther down the road, the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D.—also called “the world’s largest birdfeeder”—was a rare treat. Entirely covered inside and outside by a layer of naturally multicolored corn, this massive building has served Mitchell and the surrounding Corn Belt for many decades, first as an exposition center and now as a sports facility like no other. Nowadays its handsome basketball arena, ringed with colorful murals made entirely of ears of corn split lengthwise, is used for regional tournaments, proms, and other special events, and is the home court of the Mitchell High School basketball team, known, of course, as the Kernels.

The Great River Road

On the west bank of the Mississippi opposite LaCrosse, Wis., we abandoned I-90 to detour south on the Great River Road, which follows the river all the way from Minnesota to New Orleans. Six years ago, my son and I had driven that road from Prairie du Chien, Wis. to Port Gibson, Miss. on a similar journey: no itinerary except to follow the river as long and as far as we could. I was glad for the chance to follow it again, this time from LaCrosse down to Prairie du Chien. Up there, the Mississippi looked entirely different from the sluggish waterway lined with faux riverboat casinos we had crossed in St. Louis a couple of weeks earlier. Up there, the mighty river surged southward between Minnesota and Iowa on one side, and Wisconsin on the other, like a force to be reckoned with, a force that would be multiplied yet oddly diminished when first the Missouri River, and then the Ohio, empty into it and the whole debris-laden mass heads for the Delta. Up there, one can relish the simple prospect of a fried catfish dinner, maybe even straight from the river, which is just what I ate that night.