A Roadtrip I Would Have Liked to Go On

This sounds like it would have been a grind, but fun as well:

Now, three friends from Salt Lake City, Utah, claim to have driven through all 48 contiguous states in less than 5 days, doing it in an economy car at speeds that averaged just 65 mph over the 7,008 mile journey, which they blogged about along the way.

“We saw 90 police officers on our trip. We did not have a radar detector, and we did not get pulled over,” says Josh Keeler, an insurance underwriter who was inspired by an idea originally hatched by his father 15 years ago. Dad never got beyond the planning stages, but Josh says he picked up on the idea and got serious about making an attempt about six months ago. Using the route plotted by his father in the 1990s, the younger Keeler made some modifications and called his close friends Joey Stocking and Adam Gatherum to see if they’d be interested in joining him.

“I didn’t want this to turn into something we could’ve or should’ve done later in life, and I just thought we needed to get out a do it,” Josh says. “Joey had a couple of questions and was on board pretty quickly and I believe Adam’s only question was ‘when?’

The car they used was a 2005 Scion XB, chosen for its relatively spacious interior and good gas mileage. The only modification they made was the installation of a vortex generator at the trailing edge of the car’s roof. Although it sounds very sci-fi, the device looks like the fins of a tiny school of sharks and is designed to clean up the airflow over the vehicle, making it more aerodynamic. According to Josh, observed fuel economy was improved from an average of 29 mpg when he first bought it, to 31.3 mpg on the trip.

With boxes full of applesauce and canned soup that they would eat cold along the way, the three men pulled out of a Mobil station in Brattleboro, Vermont on Sunday, May 4. The route would zigzag its way through the continental US, barely clipping the borders of some states. They would first head down the East Coast, then arc through the deep south to Texas and Oklahoma, north to Chicago and through the Midwest and Northern Plains on the way to Washington state where they would turn south to California and Arizona before finishing up back home in Utah at The Four Corners.

They probably missed a lot of scenery, but it would still be fun to be able to say you did it.