Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily ... kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant - Softcover

Sullivan, Robert

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9781596911376: Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a lot of bad motels, a moving van, Emily ... kids, and enough coffee to kill an elephant

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596911379 ISBN 13: 9781596911376

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2007

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Robert Sullivan, who has driven cross-country more than two dozen times, recounts one of his family's many journeys from Oregon to New York. His story of moving his family back and forth from the East Coast to the West Coast (along with various other migrations), is replete with all the minor disasters, humor, and wonderful coincidences that characterize life on the road, not to mention life.

As he drives, Sullivan ponders his Lewis and Clark and other fellow nation-crossers, meets Beat poets who are devotees of cross-country icon Jack Kerouac, and plays golf on an abandoned coal mine. And, in his trademark celebration of the mundane, Sullivan investigates everything from the history of the gas pump to the origins of fast food and rest stops. Cross Country tells the tales that come from fifteen years of driving across the country (and all around it) with two kids and everything that two kids and two parents take when driving in a car from one coast to another, over and over, driving to see the way the road made America and America made the road.

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About the Author:

Robert Sullivan is the author of The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, How Not to Get Rich, and the national bestseller Rats. He is a contributing editor to Vogue and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Dwell. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two children.

From Publishers Weekly:

Sullivan (Rats; The Meadowlands) offers a boisterous, busily researched composite of trips he and his family have taken across the American continent. Sullivan claims he's gone from the West to East Coast and back about 27 times over the years, and on this particular summer sojourn, the vacationing family—comprising husband, wife and two kids, one a teenager—blast from Oregon back to their home in Brooklyn, N.Y., over five days. They first garner a personalized TripTik from AAA, which plots the route and provides essential information, then set out in a rented Impala. The author is adamant about stopping at the Columbia River Gorge to offer an extended digression on the Lewis and Clark expedition; the family then penetrates the intractable Bitterroot Range and manages to make time for Western highlights such as the Old Works Golf Course in Anaconda, Mont., before sailing through Woody Guthrie country; Jack Kerouac's gas station in Longmont, Colo.; and speedily over the George Washington Bridge. The coffee-addled navigator engages in entertaining discourses on the standardized highway system, Emily Post and the provenance of the convenience-store coffee lid, among other subjects. His narrative is fun and chatty, with an emphasis squarely on the West. (July)
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