I’m not sure I’ve ever felt older and more feeble than I do right now. I’ve just arrived back to my house in Cleveland, Ohio slightly more than 48 hours after I left Los Angeles. It’s been a whirlwind couple of days shooting across this vast and open country, packed with terrible food options, too much caffeine, late nights, and early mornings. Health officials say eighteen hours in the saddle isn’t advisable, and it’s definitely not reasonable to do it two days in a row, but I’m built different. I do all of my best thinking when I’m left alone with my thoughts, and that only really happens when I’m at the wheel.
If you’re unfamiliar with raw-dogging, it’s now a term applied to when bros fly on a plane for hours without reading, watching or listening to any form of entertainment. Some forgo water or even leaving their seat, leading to potentially disastrous consequences.
That’s one of the best parts of a road trip, the lack of distractions. Because I’m forced to focus on the road and I can’t answer texts or get sucked into a debate on Twitter, my brain slows down and gets down to business. I have the time to mull over big life decisions, replay my favorite moments, and overthink every time I ever had a dumb interaction with any other human being on earth. Thankfully I’m in a quiet and easy-driving MQB-chassis Audi A3 E-tron on this trip. It’s a lot less grueling than some of my previous cross-country companions. The heated seats are good for my back. I’m old.
I left Los Angeles (well, El Segundo to be exact, it’s all Los Angeles to a guy from Ohio) at 5 a.m. on Saturday morning after a few days in town. It was a pretty normal drive, and I stopped for an In-n-Out burger in St. George, Utah before I got out of range of the chain. Aside from that I only stopped for fuel and a bathroom break every 400 miles until I reached my destination. We’re guys, of course we’re going to try to make up time on a road trip by holding it in until the car needs gas.
The little hybrid Audi did pretty good on gas. It isn’t Prius good, but the 205 horsepower 1.4-liter turbocharged wonder pulled a passable 39 miles per gallon across the country. It didn’t seem to matter which side of the Continental Divide I was on, it got just as good of fuel economy on the uphill side as it did on the down. Doing the math, that’s around 68 gallons of high-test unleaded meted out 10 gallons at a time.
OK, so I didn’t “raw dog” the entire trip. I had to interrupt my solo brain time a little to listen to the new Sabrina Carpenter album Short n’ Sweet (which is good) and I listened to Anthony Bourdain’s posthumous 2021 book “World Travel” at 2x speed (also good.) I’m only human, I only have so many thoughts that I can obsess over.
My brain is cooked, I’m glad to be home. I think I’ll be binge watching some reality show for the next week to give my brain some junk food to nibble on. I definitely recommend you take a road trip across the country, but maybe take four or five days to do it, so you have time to stop and look around. There’s lots of great stuff to see.