The Open Road

Get behind the wheel to take the most American of journeys.

- ANGELIQUE PLATAS

From the dark, infamous corners of Hunter S. Thompson’s years riding up and down the West Coast with the Hell’s Angels and John Steinbeck’s introspective Travels with Charley: In Search of America to Jack Kerouac’s legendary weeks On the Road, simultaneously creating a great American novel and wanderlust route with beatnik friends, there’s just something so quintessentially American about a road trip. Maybe it’s the renegade history of the first recorded cross-country journey when Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson packed his two-cylinder, 20-horsepower, roofless and windowless Winton automobile with 22-year-old mechanic and co-driver Sewall Crocker and a goggle-wearing bulldog named Bud and hit the open road from San Francisco to New York on a $50 bet in 1903. Years before his time — one decade before the National Park Service was founded, two decades before Route 66 was built and half a century before the Interstate Highway System existed — Jackson made the transcontinental drive, won his $50 and established a road map for a classic American travel practice with an exceedingly American origin story.

Before Jackson, cross-country trips were only trekked in dire straits with covered wagons and high mortality rates. After, they became exciting explorations with the intention to reconnect, whether with one’s self or the country or to simply garner a feeling of being immersed in the great wide open, but all with the control and independence an automobile affords.