After finishing my visit to my dad and stepmom in Washington state earlier this month, in returning home to Virginia I completed my eighth cross-country leg (and seventh solo) since summer 2022. My husband V had already flown home from my dad’s a couple of weeks earlier to meet his work obligations, so I road tripped back on my own. Still sticking mostly to interstates, this time I decided to modify my route slightly to see some new-to-me places, and checked off two more states I hadn’t yet been to.
Category: Travel
Go Alone, Go Fast; Go Together, Go Far
A couple of weeks ago, my husband V and I drove from Virginia out to Washington state to see my dad and stepmom. My stepmom has been ill and we wanted to spend some time with her and help out my dad. My brother C and my stepbrother J with his family were also planning to be there. Although this was my fourth cross-country trip to the west coast and back in the last 13 months, it was the first one where I didn’t go alone.
As the African proverb from which I borrowed the title of this post tells us, we can get somewhere fastest on a schedule that doesn’t account for the needs of any other travelers, but going the distance often requires more support. Although I have proven with my last year of solo road trips that I can go both fast and far alone, I can also acknowledge there have been plenty of times when having another driver and companion would’ve made the trip more enjoyable (and less worry-inducing for my parents?). And I certainly experienced that on this trip.
My Top Tips for Long-Distance Solo U.S. Road Trips
People are typically surprised to hear I’ve driven from the east coast to the west coast and back alone not just once, but three times during the last 12 months. I suppose it is surprising given the distance, sometimes even to me. Of course, there are times flying to one’s destination makes the most sense. After all, I’ve lived abroad five times and until the pandemic, flew on planes like it was my job. But I absolutely LOVE driving. In 2022 I took six major solo-driver road trips, totaling a whopping 22,127 miles. I’ve continued that trend in March 2023 with my biggest solo cross-country trip yet: a personal record of 7,963 miles. Not only did I take the scenic route behind the wheel as sole driver, on five of the seven trips I was also totally alone.
Although solo road trips are something I deeply enjoy, I recognize the inherent risk. I don’t necessarily recommend someone “endurance drive” if they feel it it’s a bad idea for them. Many people have told me driving all day is boring or makes them sleepy. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been taking five-hour road trips alone and have almost never felt this way. While there are plenty of things in life I find hard to do, driving for long periods isn’t one of them. But to whatever extent it is or isn’t your thing, there are ways to make it easier. Whether a cross-country solo road trip sounds like fun or slightly insane to contemplate, in order to answer the questions I keep getting about how I do this… here in no particular order are my top 25 tips for road tripping as safely as possible in the United States, especially if I go alone.
Pelicans Galore
Last month, my husband V and I took a few days off and connected them to a weekend, heading to a five-day beach house rental on North Carolina’s Carolina Beach and kicking off the first of many fun summer plans. I (inadvertently) got a scorching sunburn, fell asleep each humid night hearing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crash into the sandy shore, saw a record two dozen pelicans at once, ate lots of good food, and even saw my favorite band. The weather was a little stormier than I’d expected, but we had about a day and a half of good beach time without a chilly wind. And the best thing: downtime with V where we didn’t have to think about work.
Festival of Spring at Burnside Farms
Over Easter weekend in early April, V and I went to the Festival of Spring at Burnside Farms in Nokesville, Virginia. Located less than 90 minutes from our home in Alexandria, the farm has planted 70 acres of tulips and daffodils every spring since 2012. Tickets can be difficult to come by, as peak bloom is unpredictable and most of the short three-week season’s tickets are snapped up as soon as they are announced. Other than a summer sunflower festival and Christmas tree farm sales in winter, Burnside Farms is more or less closed to the public.
Open Skies to the Pacific Northwest
As I mentioned in my Road Trips 2022 post, last year was a big road trip year for me.
I took five major U.S. road trips and one European road trip in 2022, racking up over 22,000 miles as a solo driver across five countries and 28 states. And that was after a relative lot of road miles during the years since we’d returned from our second diplomatic tour in Australia already: in 2019 we drove over 2,000 miles through Hawaii, followed by California, Oregon, and Washington; in 2020 we moved by car from Virginia to Mexico and once we were settled took a jaunt up to Alamogordo, NM; and in 2021 I crossed the border on smaller road trips both alone and with my husband to Las Cruces, to California and Arizona, to Carlsbad, Cloudcroft, San Antonio and Fort Worth, and Albuquerque.
Apparently the driving didn’t get old, because last month I was ready to jump back behind the wheel and drive all the way to the west coast by myself again.
Year in Review: 2022 Blog Stats and Recap
For me, 2022 was a profoundly strange year, filled with ups and downs. We finalized adopting our cat and moved from Mexico to Virginia, I succeeded in my 100-lb weight loss goal, took a road trip to Florida, started my fourth tour in Washington, DC, and visited the west coast three times in one year. I got promoted, saw my favorite band live, took fun beach trips with my husband, and took a family trip to Europe. But I also was knocked off-center by the traumatic death of an old friend, struggled at times to learn my new job, and dealt with illness – both my own and that of multiple family members.
First Christmas “At Home” in Eight Years
If we were to discuss what sucks most about the Foreign Service lifestyle, the majority of Foreign Service Officers would agree missing holidays or special occasions with family back home ranks near the top of the list.
Last December I went to the west coast to see my parents for Christmas. It marked our first Christmas holiday together since 2014 when I got a few days’ reprieve from full-time, mandatory Russian language training and flew with V to my mom’s for Christmas. If someone would have told me back then I wouldn’t come back for Christmas until 2022, I would’ve been dumbfounded.
On the Road Again: Coast to Coast
As I mentioned in my Road Trips 2022 roundup post last December, I not only drove by myself from northern Virginia to the west coast in June, but also in November to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. I left at the end of a busy work day the Thursday before the holiday, fighting my way through rush-hour traffic on the beltway to get a head start on my journey.
And as usual when you’re trying to leave the office for a couple of weeks at a time, I had an active international parental child abduction case with two children returning to the United States from Venezuela in-progress that very afternoon. Thanks to the help of my excellent colleagues, I was able to track the return up until I needed to walk out the door, and then hand the case off to my backup. As I crossed my first mountain pass in Pennsylvania’s Alleghenies against pelting snow, she worked to monitor the landing of the children’s flight in Miami and update our leadership on their reunification with the left-behind parent. When I finally checked into my motel in Ohio and caught up with my work emails very late at night, I was elated to see all was well that ended well. Fortunately for me, my road trip went just as smoothly.
Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VIII: Skopje & Demir Kapija, 20 Years Later
After returning from our 10-day, whirlwind 2,000 kilometer road trip around the former Yugoslavia last summer, we only had one full day remaining in Macedonia before our flight home to Virginia. My husband V and I decided it made no sense to return the rental car to the airport, only to turn around and take a taxi back to the airport for our early morning flight less than 36 hours later. Instead we skipped going to the airport twice and paying for taxis in favor of just keeping the car and leveraging it for a short visit to my former Peace Corps homestay family.
They lived a couple of hours south of the capital city, Skopje, in the town of Demir Kapija. We knew paying them a weekday morning visit was probably not ideal; we were on vacation but that didn’t mean anyone else was. Fortunately, (a) it’s Macedonia and (b) we had already been in touch with them to align schedules. We certainly couldn’t visit everyone we wanted on this trip because of time constraints; for the first time, I never made it to the far east, back to the site where I had served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. But as they had once opened their home to me, I did not want to leave without seeing them. It seemed apropos that 20 years after first coming to Macedonia I was returning to where it all began.
Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VII: Sarajevo to Skopje via Kruševac
The sunny August morning we left Sarajevo, it was harder than I thought it would be to find our way out of town. I don’t remember exactly why; some combination of narrow streets and Google Maps trying to lead me onto a pedestrian footpath might have had something to do with the smell of burning clutch and frayed nerves in the morning.
V, A and I worked together and managed to make a series of navigational decisions that – while not winning any efficiency awards – also didn’t result in any fender benders. Thankfully at least, when hearing how early we wanted to get on the road, our AirBnB host decided he didn’t need to do our checkout in-person after all and allowed us to lock the apartment and hide the key in an agreed-upon location. We eventually hit the highway east and later, due south for the last few hundred miles of our road trip.
Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VI: Dubrovnik to Sarajevo via Mostar
The morning we departed Croatia, we said thank you to the beach house for the wonderful memories. We were sad to leave the coast, and drove alongside it until we began to ascend into the mountains. We had taken the road to Dubrovnik’s north rather than to the south, in order to stop for lunch in Mostar – a city none of us had visited – on our way to Sarajevo. The total distance would be around 165 miles; however, drive time minus stops would be close to 4.5 hours given the mountain roads.
Not long into our journey, before we had even crossed the Croatia-Bosnia border, we saw smoke off in the distance. Initially we didn’t think much of it. But as we continued, it became darker and more ominous, and soon after we ran into a forest-fire related roadblock and detour. The detour wasn’t well-explained by the gruff policeman, and took us a fair distance off the Google Maps path we had launched before leaving beach house wifi – slightly alarming since we were navigating without live internet. However, A saved the day with an offline Snapchat map, something I hadn’t even known existed since I haven’t opened my Snapchat app for eight years. (I know.)
After we jumped that hurdle, we then had a slightly not-so-hilarious situation with one of us, who shall remain unnamed, needing a bathroom where none existed within binocular range of the Bosnian border. After idling in the weeds and hoping inquisitive soldiers wouldn’t appear at any moment and ask us what the hell we were up to, we made it across afterwards without further incident.
Balkan Summer Trip 2022, Part V: Dubrovnik Old Town
On our second full day at the beach house, we woke up early, took a quick swim, and ate breakfast on the patio in preparation to go to old town. Initially the plan was for me to drive us the 12 minutes to the old quarter and find a place to park, but as I was dealing with some extreme vertigo out of the blue while getting ready, V and A – after lingering a while in the hopes I wouldn’t be delayed – were eventually convinced to take an Uber there without me. I had been unsuccessful in averting my head-spinning situation, and ended up vomiting several times, taking a Dramamine, and lying down. My head felt like a yo-yo on the end of a string, and as I lay still and miserable I had to keep one foot on the floor and a hand on the wall to avoid zero gravity sensations. But as is typical and hard to explain, my stomach did not hurt at all. After about a 90-minute nap, I reawoke in the silence of the empty house to the waves crashing outside. I sat up cautiously and ate some fake Pringles. The dizziness had subsided and it was as if it had never happened. I was going to old town.
Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part IV: Višegrad to Dubrovnik
It took us nearly five hours to drive the last 150 miles of winding mountain roads between Višegrad, Bosnia & Herzegovina and the Croatian coast. I rarely drove faster than 45 mph simply because the speed limit and conditions didn’t allow it, and I likely would have made even myself carsick. V and A were excellent passengers. V only complained once, and he was probably right; it really can be alarming to be a passenger and have no control as you roll through narrow tunnels black as night, uphill past slow trucks that drift into your lane, and around blind corners, every once in a while a bit too fast even with a driver as pokey as myself. We crossed the Croatian border without incident and the vast jewel of the Adriatic lay before us.
Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part III: Kragujevac to Višegrad
The town where V’s brother V2 lives, Kragujevac, is Serbia’s fourth-largest city with just under 175,000 inhabitants. Situated about an hour and a half south of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, the region is proud of the more affordable living and rural beauty it offers while still boasting plenty of nearby shopping and amenities commensurate with the big city. V2 and his wife D – whose family hails at least three generations back from Kragujevac – made it a point to show us around, welcoming us to town with a dinner out that included a large group of their extended friends and family.
Collecting Postcards 