long drives

Sweetpea posted a fun meme this morning that included the question “longest car rides.” And that got me thinking about all of the long car rides I’ve done over the years (a few maps included):

1. New London, CT, to Salt Lake City, UT (2,292 miles – map). I did this one with my friend, Paul, between our junior and senior years at Connecticut College (summer of 1995). He was driving out to Utah for a summer internship, and I tagged along. We did the drive in 2 1/2 days, including one day that took us from central Pennsylvania to Lincoln, Nebraska (around 1,100 miles) – done simply to avoid rush hour traffic in Chicago.
2. Salt Lake City, UT, to Middletown, CT, via Virginia Beach, VA (2,773 miles – map). sprite and I did this one in 1997, as the return leg of a cross-country road trip that happened shortly after I was fired from my first post-college job. We made the detour to Virignia Beach because we had tickets to see James Taylor in concert there. Along the way, we stopped to see Denver’s bison herd, ate at the A&W in Russell, KS (home of Bob Dole), stood under the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and managed to just barely get the last room at a Red Roof Inn in West Virginia.
3. Middletown, CT, to Salt Lake City, UT (2,415 miles – map). This is the outbound leg of the 1997 road trip. It featured stops in Chicago, in Winterset, Iowa (birthplace of John Wayne and the gateway to all of Madison County’s bridges), in Lincoln, Nebraska (where we received a nifty tour of their state capitol building), and a drive through Rocky Mountain National Park. Sometime soon I’ll scan in the pictures from the trip.
4. Middletown, CT, to Montréal and Québec City, Quebec, and back to Middletown via Maine (1,040 miles). sprite had to get out of the United States before she turned 25, so we did this road trip during foliage season. We planned on stopping in Vermont, but there was no room at any inn, so we soldiered on to the outskirts on Montréal on the first day. This trip was thoroughly enjoyable and scenic: the drive along the Ste. Lawrence river was most beautiful.
5. Salt Lake City, UT, to Whistler, British Columbia, via Vernon, British Columbia (1,334 miles- map). The summer after my freshman year of college, I helped drive my ski team’s van to summer camp at Whistler. I drove with one of my coaches, who hails from Vernon, so we spent a couple of days at his parents’ house where we built a log fence for the family’s horses. It was a fun time – really!
6. New Orleans, LA, to Windsor Locks, CT (1,615 miles – map). This was the trip I didn’t want to make. On September 11, 2001, I was in New Orleans on a business trip. After all air traffic was grounded, my co-worker and I were stuck in NOLA, and once the airlines started flying again, she was too scared to use the return leg of our ticket. So we rented a car (the nearest was in Baton Rouge, so we took a limo to pick up the rental), and drove back, making sure to avoid the greater NYC area.
7. Salt Lake City, UT, to Miami, FL (2,627 miles – map). I don’t remember much about this trip, as I was 7 years old at the time. My dad, his friend Paul and I went to Miami to help move my great aunt to Utah. My job was to escort my aunt (who spoke little-to-no English) navigate the airports in Miami and Dallas-Ft. Worth. I know (from stories told by both dad and Paul) that my handheld Pac-Man game drove them nuts with all the noise.
8. Salt Lake City, UT, to Monterey and San Francisco, CA, and back to SLC (1,827 miles). This was a spur-of-the-moment, New Year’s weekend road trip with my friend, Menasheh. We swung south at Reno, Nevada, so that we could drive into Yosemite National Park (which involved driving into the park on a snow-covered access road). We had a great time during the trip, as we camped a couple of nights and saw a fun comedy show on NYE. The drive back to SLC from Oakland was done in one, 10-hour stretch. At one point on the return trip, we were pulled over by a Nevada State Trooper who caught us doing 110 miles per hour – only to have him say “slow down near the exit ramps, fellas.”

I’m sure there are other big-time drives, and that both of our trips to the UK would count, but I’d need to spend a lot more time calculating the drive distances to make them work properly.

Feel free to share your long (or epic) drives in the comments!