| Roadtrip! | Toronto Star Wheels - 05/17/08 | |
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Now there's an idea: jump in the car and just keep rollin' on down the highway.
The lure of a roadtrip has proven irresistible to many, (search YouTube for "roadtrip" and over 26,000 videos pop up), though people's reasons for hitting the road are about as varied as the routes taken. While not everyone's running down the road trying to loosen their load, there's often more to a roadtrip than just getting the family to Wally World. At its best a roadtrip is a journey, -in both the literal and figurative sense of the word, down unfamiliar roads, fueled by a spirit of adventure, good conversation, lots of laughs, some breathtaking scenery, a little soulful introspection and perhaps even an epiphany or two. Given the popularity of these ll is it any wonder that the roadtrip has crept into seemingly every aspect of life? HIT THE ROAD JACK "Why aren't we flying? Because getting there is half the fun." -Clark Griswold The first successful cross-Canada drive was a 52-day trip from Halifax to Vancouver back in 1912. A bit of a marketing ploy for the REO Motorcar Company, the car company supplied a 1912 REO Touring Car as well as one of their mechanics, Jack Haney, to accompany journalist Thomas Wilby, who penned the book "A Motor Tour Through Canada" after the journey. Turning roadtrip logbooks and diaries into published literature seems to be a natural, and oft repeated, progression. In John Steinbeck's case, the Nobel Prize-wining author wrote Travels with Charley: In Search of America in 1961 after completing a 10,000 mile trip in a rigged-up camper truck (christened "Rocinante" in honor of Don Quixote's horse), his pet poodle Charley his sole companion. Neil Peart, drummer for the legendary Canadian band Rush, has logged many miles on his motorcycle and along the way authored four books including his latest Roadshow: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour By Motorcycle (Rounder Books, 2007). But no roadtrip-themed library would be complete without a sampling of the many cookbooks that merge highway travelogues with tasty recipes. Marian Clark's Route 66 Cookbook: Comfort Food from the Mother Road, for example, followed a favourite route, while Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller brought whole new meaning to "cooking on the road" with Manifold Destiny (Villard, 1998), their guide to actually cooking on a car's engine. Not taking things quite so literally the Food Network's television series Feasting on Asphalt combined roadtrips and food with host Alton Brown, a knowledgeable foodie and award-winning cookbook author, who gathered up some buddies, hopped on his motorcycle and hit the American roadways with the express purpose of chowing down on road food. Brown's latest book Feasting on Asphalt: The River Run chronicles his journey alongside the Mississippi River during the second season of the TV series. Cooking programs aside, television has covered a lot of ground with different roadtrip-based shows, from drama (Fox's short-lived road-race drama Drive), to sports (Road Hockey Rumble -the rough and tumble traveling road-hockey tournament on the Outdoor Life Network) and so-called reality television, (The Simple Life: Roadtrip had Paris Hilton behind the wheel of an Airstream-towing pink pickup with pal Nicole Richie riding shotgun.) Sooner or later it seems every television show gets around to running their own roadtrip episode, with even Mickey, Donald and Goofy experiencing a little automotive adventure in the 1938 cartoon Mickey's Trailer, and Futurama staging its own Beck-inspired rock and roll roadtrip (Bendin' in the Wind, 2001). DRIVE TIME FILM "It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses... Hit it!" Elwood and Jake -The Blues Brothers Hollywood has of course always recognized the roadtrip as a vehicle with which to steer the storyline through endless twists and turns. Screenwriters know that if you take a dysfunctional family (Little Miss Sunshine - 2006), a couple of men (Easy Rider-1969), women (Thelma & Louise - 1991), randy teenagers (Y Tu Mama Tambien-2001), even suicide victims (Wristcutters: A Love Story), stick them in a vehicle for a long time, over a lot of miles, interesting things are bound to happen. The roadtrip movie truly is a genre all to itself, whether aiming for laughs (National Lampoon's Vacation - 1983), drama (Transamerica - 2005), horror (The Hitcher - 1986), action (Duel -1971), romance (It Happened One Night - 1934), teen audiences (Road Trip - 2000), families (The Thing about My Folks - 2005) or children (The Muppet Movie - 1979). Over the years roadtrips have been the foundation for some decidedly different tales including the cult classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tom Wolfe's hallucinogenic tome "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", which is reportedly headed to the big screen soon. Of course one's choice of traveling companions for these expeditions Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain) certainly adds to the experience. Filming the antics of band members on the road, then combining it with footage from a band's concerts and travels has produced several rockumentaries, (Elvis Costello's Off the Beaten Path: A Road Trip with Elvis and Pete).and even a few mockumentaries. Not surprisingly comedians have also tumbled to the idea of bringing a camera crew along on the road to capture all the behind-the-scene yuks. For actor/comedian Ray Romano's documentary 95 Miles To Go it was more a case of sticking a camera in the hand of an intern from Everybody Loves Raymond, then stuffing him in the car alongside Romano and his friend/director Tom Caltabiano while they drove a thousand miles in eight days en route to stand-up gigs in seven cities. The latest show to hit theatres, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights Hollywood to Heartland, allows viewers to ride shotgun while a troupe of comedians covers 6,000 miles via tour bus. DRIVING THE POINT HOME "What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land." Ernesto Guevara The systematic geographic progression of a cross-country roadtrip makes it a popular strategy, and an effective marketing tool, with many folks hitting the road to tub-thump a product or cause including Dr. David Suzuki, whose 2007 "If You Were Prime Minister" environmental tour visited fifty cities across Canada, -via diesel bus. The United States Tennis Association even framed its 2006 US Open Series in the context of a roadtrip with several top tennis stars appearing in television commercials touting the ten-cities-in-six-weeks tour as "The Greatest Road Trip in Sports". Looking at developing countries and investment markets from the perspective of a roadtrip was the angle that launched investor Jim Rogers on an around-the-world motorcycle trip covering more than 100,000 miles and six continents. His first book Investment Biker led to his second: Adventure Capitalist The Ultimate Investor's Road Trip, (Random House 2004) written after his second trip, a three-year journey completed in 2002 for which he drove a one-of-a-kind custom-built Mercedes-Benz covering 152,000 miles, 115 countries, and six continents. Roadtrips apparently beget other roadtrips, with many trippers eagerly heading out again and again on new routes of their own making. Others take to the highway looking to duplicate a famous expedition or fictional roadtrip route. Jack Kerouac's classic 1957 novel On the Road is perhaps the most oft-repeated odyssey, with many finding inspiration in Sal's words: "What's your road, man?--holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow." Still others are inspired to mark the anniversary of a momentous roadtrip with a journey of their own, as was the case eighty-five years after that first cross-Canada drive automotive when historian Lorne Findlay commemorated the event by retracing the exact route in his own 1912 Reo. Wheels own editor, Mark Richardson, followed the route taken in Robert Pirsig's philosophical Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance then wrote his own book Zen and Now, the launch of which this fall will coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the original trip. LITERATURE, MUSIC AND ART ON THE OPEN ROAD "The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive." Bruce Springsteen While authors have long found the cross-country book promotion tour to be a grueling, but effective, way to meet readers and sell books, musicians are perhaps the true veterans of the roadtrip circuit. Whether its Vancouver's fledgling indie-rock band Said the Whale hopscotching their way through a string of Canadian venues, or mega-star Cher on her three-year long "Farewell Tour", roadtrips are an inevitable part of a musician's life, not to mention the inspiration for many a lyric. Not surprisingly, the roadtrip itself often proves to be an essential part of the artistic equation. Artist Derek Michael Besant (www.derekbesant.com) drove across Canada over the course of a year, sleeping in different motels every night and photographing the unmade beds in adjacent rooms the next morning. The photos then became part of Fifteen Restless Nights, a contemporary art installation currently on exhibit in Canada and Europe. Viewing the road from a different perspective photographer Stephan Schacher traveled over 13,000 miles across Canada and the U.S., -first in an old Volkswagen van, then a 35-foot motor home and finally on a motorcycle, all the while taking photos of the food he ate, and the people who served it to him, for his book Plates and Dishes: The Food and Faces of the Roadside Diner. (Princeton Architectural Press - 2005) FINDING YOURSELF ON THE ROAD "I did not really believe in a destination called "healing", but at least I had begun to believe in the road, and that was enough to keep me riding westward", wrote Neil Peart in the opening pages of Ghost Rider. The cathartic power of driving aside, there are plenty of reasons, -if reasons are really necessary, to take a roadtrip. In the movies roadtrips are often born out of the desire to mark a passage or milestone: college graduation (Fandango), bachelorhood (Sideways), or the ever- popular middle-life crisis (Wild Hogs). These odysseys inevitably lead, -at least in cinematic versions, to an epiphany of some sort, the realization that it's the journey, and not the destination, that's important. "We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes." Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Many roadtrips though truly are fuelled by that most fundamental of quests: the desire to find oneself. Even for the Muppets. Gonzo: Where are you going? Fozzie: We're following our dreams. The documentary 10mph, (www.10mph.com) too is an example of a couple of guys ditching their "soul-sucking cubicle jobs" in the IT industry and pursing their dreams by going on a roadtrip. Except their trip, -from Seattle to Boston, was on a Segway, -one of those quirky two-wheeled self-balancing electric transportation devices with a speedometer that barely reaches double-digits, -hence the film's name. On a decidedly faster-paced trip, another group of friends hit the road in search of the answer to that burning question: "What are we going to do with our lives?" Piling into a dilapidated old green 31-foot RV, they traveled across America for three months in 2001, covered 15,000 miles and interviewed over 80 people employed in all types of occupations. That journey, and the footage shot along the way, not only evolved into a book Roadtrip Nation (Ballantine 2003) and a PBS documentary, The Open Road, but also two more books, a weekly PBS series and a website (www.roadtripnation.com), plus an ongoing international student movement for which Roadtrip Nation partners with college career centers and conducts learning programs, offering student grants and opportunities for their own roadtrips. A message (traditionally left by past Roadtrip Nation participants for future ones), written on the door of one of the RVs declares in part: "This trip can never give you all the answers, it never could, but it has given me the questions". GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN Actor Ewan McGregor said his own forays into roadtripping were "the most extraordinary thing that's ever happened to me", -this from an award-winning movie star who thrice played Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi. McGregor first climbed aboard his motorcycle alongside his friend Charley Boorman back in 2004 for the "Long Way Round Trip" a 20,000 mile ride from London to New York, via Asia and Alaska. The pair then set out again in 2007 on a 15,000 mile ride from John O'Groats, Scotland to Cape Town, South Africa, with both journeys bringing attention to UNICEF's humanitarian efforts in such places as Ukraine, Mongolia, Uganda and Malawi. Granted, not everyone can mount "life-changing" international roadtrips like McGregor's which covered thousands of miles and spawned documentaries, books, DVDs, and CDs plus an interactive website. But a roadtrip, no matter the destination or purpose, truly is something that must be experienced. "Wandering around our America has changed me more than I thought. I am not me any more. At least I'm not the same me I was." The Motorcycle Diaries There's a reason "Go on a road trip" is an aspiration that ranks high on so many life lists. Riding those "horses of gas and steel" is a unique experience and, just as the song says, once you've had a taste of going places you've never been and seeing things you may never see again, you just can't wait to get on the road again. |
