<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"A funny thing happened about 20 years ago\u2014assuming your standards of amusement, like mine, are not too high. I was on a cross-country trip with my friend Tom Cotter in his newly purchased red 1964 289 Cobra, and we were driving from the San Francisco area to his home in North Carolina. Top down, all the way. While cruising eastward along US Highway 40 one beautiful sunny day, we downshifted and burbled into the small city of Craig, Colorado. Tom glanced into the rearview mirror and said, &amp;quot;You know what this car needs? It needs a nice vintage suitcase strapped on the luggage rack, just to have the correct period look.&amp;quot; I glanced back at the empty chrome luggage rack and nodded. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d look a lot more like Tod and Buzz on the old Route 66 show,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d also have more luggage room. I could buy a second pair of socks.&amp;quot; Tom pondered the problem for a moment and said, &amp;quot;It can&amp;#039;t be just any vintage suitcase. The old tweed ones you&amp;#039;d see on the running board of a Model A wouldn&amp;#039;t look right. It has to be more modern, like the hard-shell Samsonite suitcases everyone used in the Fifties and Sixties.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If you turn left at the next stoplight and go back one block,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s an antique shop on the main drag, right next to the frontier museum. They have two vintage Samsonite suitcases high up on a shelf behind the counter.&amp;quot; Tom did a theatrical double take and said, &amp;quot;How do you know that?&amp;quot; I shrugged. &amp;quot;The suitcases were there last time I drove through Craig, a few months ago. My buddy Tony Buechler and I were driving my Porsche 356 from the Napa Valley back to Wisconsin, and Tony, who collects vintage Colts and Winchesters, stopped at that shop to buy an old .45 Single Action Army revolver. I had a lot of time to look around, and I noticed the suitcases.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Jeez, Egan,&amp;quot; Tom said, &amp;quot;every time we go through a town, you know where all the restaurants and gas stations are, and which ones have bad coffee. And now an antique shop with Samsonite suitcases. How many times have you driven across the country, anyway?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;ve never driven all the way across the U.S. in one continuous trip before,&amp;quot; I admitted. &amp;quot;But when I was growing up, we had one set of grandparents in Brooklyn and the other in California, so we traveled to one coast or the other almost every other summer. Also, I&amp;#039;ve been working for Road &amp;amp;amp; Track and Cycle World for a long time, so there&amp;#039;ve been a lot of car and bike trips.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, how many times would you estimate you&amp;#039;ve made the trip between Wisconsin and the West Coast, not counting airline travel?&amp;quot; I thought about that for a minute and said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d guess maybe 14 or 15 times.&amp;quot; Tom shook his head. He&amp;#039;d spent most of his life on the East Coast and told me he hadn&amp;#039;t driven much in the West, mostly flying in on ski trips. &amp;quot;This is also my first trip all the way across the U.S. by car,&amp;quot; he said. Tom turned the Cobra left, followed my instructions, and we found the antique shop. The Samsonite suitcases were still there, and Tom bought a nice one for the luggage rack on the car. We finally had that classic Route 66 look, even though we were driving a Cobra rather than a Corvette. Close enough. When we stopped for the night, I got out a piece of hotel stationery and tried to see if I could list the trips I&amp;#039;d made from Wisconsin to the West Coast, or vice versa. What I came up with later that night was 14 round trips and six one-way trips, for 34 total crossings of the Great Divide. The only way I could remember the individual trips was by thinking about the vehicles used. And these were, in roughly chronological order: A Santa Fe Railroad Vista-Dome passenger car; 1962 Ford Fairlane; 1968 VW Beetle; brand-new 1975 Norton Commando (which blew up in Missoula, Montana, so we went the rest of the way to Seattle by train and bus); 1980 Suzuki GS1000; 1980 Datsun 210; 1961 Bugeye Sprite; 1984 Westfield Lotus Eleven replica (which I finished assembling moments before the trip); 1984 BMW R100RS (twice); 1930 Ford Model A; 1993 Harley Electra Glide Sport; 1956 Citro\u00EBn 2CV Truckette; 1998 Ford SVT Contour; 1999 BMW R1100S; 1972 Dino 246 GT; two clapped-out Chevy vans towing the same Lotus Super 7; 1996 Harley Road King; 1963 Porsche 356C; and a 1997 Ford Econoline van with two dirt bikes in it, bound for Baja.  And then there was our 1945 Piper J-3 Cub. In 1987, Barb and I flew it from California to Florida, up the East Coast to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and then back to California via the upper Midwest. In 1990, when we moved back to Wisconsin, my friend Pat Donnelly helped me fly it back here. And just last summer, I did another cross-country jaunt in a 1991 British Racing Green Miata belonging to my friend Doug Harper, from Portland, Oregon, to Wisconsin. So the trip count is now up to 39. And you think you have lines on your face. I&amp;#039;ve spent more hours worrying about oil pressure, piston speed, and funny noises than Charles Lindbergh. It&amp;#039;s nice to have made all these trips\u2014and lived to tell about it\u2014but one of the problems with a lifetime of east\u2013west travel is that you become overfamiliar with the most obvious routes, wearing a deep groove in the map, so to speak.  I&amp;#039;m actually starting to recognize cashiers in gas stations as far away as Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and Elko, Nevada, as if they were bartenders at the corner tavern. I don&amp;#039;t know them by name, but I often think to myself, &amp;quot;Ah, this guy again,&amp;quot; or, &amp;quot;Well, if it isn&amp;#039;t the woman with the gold tooth who always calls me &amp;#039;Honey.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s reassuring, but sometimes you&amp;#039;d like to meet new people. This problem of excess familiarity cropped up again just three weeks ago. Barb and I were leaving on a trip to the Southwest in a new Jeep Wrangler (big story to come!), and the night before we left, Barb asked, &amp;quot;What route do you want to take down to New Mexico?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m still thinking,&amp;quot; I said. And after Barb went to bed, I sat up until midnight, looking at our big Rand McNally Road Atlas. How to go? We&amp;#039;d crossed the country on all the major interstates several times. We&amp;#039;d followed I-10 with our Piper Cub, done an Old Route 66 story on a motorcycle, followed the Pony Express Trail to Sacramento, California, and driven our Bullitt Mustang along the Santa Fe Trail.  Also, we&amp;#039;d been to Colorado and back three times in the past year, so I was suddenly unable to face another drive down to Des Moines, Iowa, through Dubuque and Cedar Rapids. I also didn&amp;#039;t want to see one more inch of interstate. So I decided to resist the usual temptation to take off from our house on the exact compass heading of our destination. It was probably this Magnetic Course Syndrome that had put us on the same roads so many times. In leaving home, I have a tendency to drive over the lawn rather than waste time with a badly aimed driveway. When we left at dawn, therefore, I turned slightly northwest on local farm roads. &amp;quot;Where are we going?&amp;quot; Barb asked. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s take Highway 18 straight west into Iowa, then go south on 63 into Missouri, and take 36 over to St. Joseph. Jog to the Southwest in stair-steps and then head for New Mexico one step south of the Santa Fe Trail.&amp;quot; Sounded good to Barb, so that&amp;#039;s what we did. Truth be told, we did hit a few roads we&amp;#039;d been on before, but not many. We also had to veer toward the interstate a few times, just to find motels and open restaurants. But by initially feinting north and then a little farther south than usual, we were able to meet a few new gas-station cashiers. And it got better in New Mexico and Arizona, simply because we were on a trail that took us north and south through those states. Coming home, we stopped in the Four Corners area at a Navajo craft shop, where I watched a woman making a beautiful Navajo blanket, and it suddenly occurred to me that nearly all our previous travels had been horizontal, along an east\u2013west trajectory, like a shuttle headed for the mythical coast. Or home. What we needed to do was follow the warp instead of the woof. We&amp;#039;d been weaving half a blanket all our lives. Maybe for our next big adventure, we needed to go west through Canada and then cut directly south through the Rockies. Or swoop down toward the Gulf and visit our friends in Marfa, Texas, then drive north to Calgary, Alberta. The great mountain ranges pointed the way. When we got home, my motorcycle-touring buddy Mike Mosiman from Fort Collins, Colorado, called. He was all fired up, planning his next big trip. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never made a complete motorcycle trip from sea to shining sea,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;and I&amp;#039;m thinking it would be fun to take one of the classic even-numbered routes like US 6 or 20 or 30 all the way across the country. You interested?&amp;quot; I spent the evening examining the U.S. map in the front of the Rand McNally Road Atlas and had to admit there was a certain symbolic rightness to eating seafood on both coasts. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner once observed that Americans are a &amp;quot;westering&amp;quot; people, and he certainly had my number. Still, I&amp;#039;m suddenly in a mood for some of those odd-numbered, north\u2013south highways never taken: US 93, 191, or even 19 through the Appalachians, even if I&amp;#039;d have to travel a while to get there. I&amp;#039;ve crossed most of these roads at right angles at least 39 times\u2014three times in a Piper Cub\u2014yet where they lead remains largely shrouded in mystery. It might be fun to head into the unknown again, at the risk of not knowing exactly where a good Fifties Samsonite suitcase can be found. Peter Egan is R&amp;amp;amp;T&amp;#039;s editor at large. He&amp;#039;s been known to go back and forth on plenty of things. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a4667/side-glances-excessive-use-of-the-great-divide-65-1-roa0813/?src=global_footer>