From Coast to Coast

My first coast to coast, American trip happened in 1971 when, upon arriving from Australia, I boarded a Greyhound bus in Los Angeles and went from city to city all the way to New York before traveling to Montreal where I caught my flight back to France.

Little did I know that it would be the prelude of a series of long road trips spanning over 55 years. The second big trip included my wife and our two rambunctious young children (5 and 3) that took us from Chappaqua in New York to Park City, our new promised land in 1985.

Between 2007 and 2012 we took a few road trips between Utah and Berkeley, California, where our daughter got her first job. In 2012, I accompanied my daughter to California as she switched from her small car to a nicer station-wagon. In November that same year, as she got a governmental position in Washington with the US Government, our daughter drove her car back to Utah and my wife and I drove it to Virginia where she lived.

It’s only in October 2025, when things started to unravel with Trump, that our daughter left her great job to return to California. We kept her car in our garage with the intent to drive it back to San Francisco in the spring and that’s just what we did between April and May, making a side trip to Las Vegas, Death Valley, the Pacific Coast and a second cruise North along Coastal Highway 5 in California.

If we add this all up we’d get to 13,700 miles. It’s a bit hard to say that we came full circle, but we’ve seen a lot of America over the years and we’re glad we did. In the next few blogs we’ll relate our adventures as we drove along...