THE JOURNEY IS THE REWARD
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment we lost faith. The whole journey plays back like some swashbuckling adventure in a long-lost pirate’s tale. Our ship, the mid-modern equivalent of a “living room on wheels,” had gotten ofF to a shaky start when the ceiling vent hit the shag carpet with a thump at the 30-mile mark. Only 1,900 miles to go. At that point, we looked at each other and lied to ourselves, uttering, “We got this.”
My wife and I were novice big-rig drivers. We had struck out from the suburbs of Saint Paul, Minnesota, piloting an RV that had inspired a comical piece of movie history known as the “EM50 Urban Assault Vehicle”—a fictional, armored fort on wheels from the movie Stripes. This unlikely vehicle was based on a 1970s GMC Palm Beach motorhome, which is what we found ourselves driving from the Midwest to the Pacific coast.
We were old enough to have laughed our overalls off when
