Depending on how you define these things, I've made seven cross-country road trips in these 40 years of life.

The first two (my only round trip voyage) occured when I was about eleven or twelve. Family summer vacation: driving from Albuquerque to Maine and back again in a Ford Van with two parents and six kids. It felt endless, cramped and really boring. It was the pre-walkman era or car-cassette-player era–even though cassettes were in wide circulation. Every half hour or so we adjusted the radio, keeping ourselves tuned-in to local stations. Mostly AM stations back then. The seek and scan buttons had yet to penetrate the car market. God, that feels so long ago. Anyway, the dial twiddling got pretty tiresome and we gave up for long stretches. Plus, Mom and Dad were really into teaching us how to sing songs from Broadway Musicals. I learned how to solve the Rubik's cube on that trip. It's remarkably easy once you own that book that teaches you how to do it and you have a hundred or so hours to fine-tune your skills. I think I could solve it in 3 minutes or so–far from the world record, but enough to beat most of my friends when we were back home. Besides mastering the Rubik's cube, what sticks with me about that journey is the return trip. The smell of a two-year-old's diaper with a case of diarrhea. Mom had flown home from Maine suddenly to attend a funeral, so for the final days the task of cleaning up the pungent green poop fell to the oldest two sons while Dad kept the Ford hurtling back to New Mexico.

The third trip was traveling with a girl friend from NYC to Albuquerque by Greyhound. I was 23. This was the CD era, but barely. There were no CD burners available commerically, so you still used recordable cassette tapes on road trips. The process involved the tedious copying of new CDs to cassettes and the manufacturing of mixtapes from older tapes. It was so labor-intensive! I can't believe we used to do that. Anyway, the cross country trip was also really labor-intensive. But I saw Graceland. What I remember most is how weird it felt traveling with a bus full of people in very different life circumstances than me and my girl friend. There were many great stories of the interactions we had with quirky bus-travelers, but those have all faded now. I have few clear memories of that trip. And no, I wasn't using substances at that point. Damn, the brain is a problematic recording device.

The fourth trip was with another girl friend traveling by car from NYC to Albuquerque using one of those vehicle delivery services. I was 24. I'd just finished college. The Pontiac ultimately had to get dropped off in Denver, so I stopped in Albuquerque and unloaded my belongings, drove to Denver, and then took the bus seven hours back home. It was cost-effective. It was also still the pre-CD burning era, so we played tapes again, mixes mainly, copied from our CDs. It was 1994. The summer belonged to the Beastie Boys (Ill Communication) and was rounded out with Pavement's Crooked Rain and Frank Black's Teenager of the Year. Not to mention Liz Phair, Beck, the Breeders and Sonic Youth. We smoked a lot of weed. I remember driving past a really bad accident somewhere in Kentucky, just minutes after it had happened–two mini vans mangled-up in the grassy median and people running towards it from both sides of the highway and no emergency vehicles yet–and feeling super horribly freaked-out paranoid for the next several hours of driving. Not paranoid enough though to not smoke another bowl before getting on the road again the next day. The other thing I remember of that trip was an early morning discovery that one of my possessions, a big ceramic god-like sunstone-like sun-face that decorated my college wall for a couple years, had cracked while tied to the roof. I remember privately throwing the shards in a river next to the motel and feeling the weighty symbolism of that act.

The fifth trip was the only true coast-to-coast cross country drive. Another vehicle delivery service. LA to Boston. I was 25. I drove solo until I picked up some hippie acquaintances in Boulder on their way to Hampshire College. We stopped off in Chicago and crashed at Rachel's place. We got a speeding ticket in Pennsylvania. We arrived at Hampshire on Halloween eve. We all took mushrooms. I remember heading out still kind of high about 5am the next morning to visit Jack Kerouak's grave site in Lowell, MA on my way to drop off the car and stay with the Watermans in Boston. I remember that visitors had written stuff in chalk over his grave stone. There was a piece of discarded chalk. I wrote something too. I can't remember what. Something a little cynical. I remember feeling like I was quite done with my romantic fascination with the Beats and all that go-go-go velocity stuff. It was a cool crush while it lasted.

The sixth trip was from Albuquerque to Philly. I was 32. It was the best cross country trip I've ever had. It was with Rebecca. Crazy in love. Driving a 24 foot Uhaul with all our stuff, lives officially combined for the first time, three crying cats in the cab, and a Toyota Tercel on a two-wheel trailer dragging behind us. We had a bunch of Adderal from a friend. We drove late into the night. It was finally the CD-burner era. We played friend's roadtrip mix CDs on a battery-operated boom box. Alas, Uhaul did not offer CD playing vehicles in that era. We snuck cats into motel rooms. Fucked like we were outlaws. And left big tips at the Waffle House. Made it to the East Coast in under three days. Phenomenal.

The most recent trip was from Florida to Utah. It was just two weeks ago. My sister and I drove a 26 foot Uhaul with my sister's stuff and a 4 door sedan towed behind. A well-mannered dog shared the cab with us. We drove through 12 states. And sampled four different brands of mini bottle energy shots from trucker stops. We kind of got a little hooked (Red-top 5-hour is our favorite.) We listened to the radio here and there. Mostly we played MP3s on a portable battery-operated speaker. We cruised the internet most of the trip on an iphone 3gs. But there is an almost 60 mile black-out zone in Nebraska. What?! And then a few patches through the deserts of Wyoming and Utah. The trip took four days.

Here's what I've learned during these drives:

1.) Vehicles perpetually lag behind audio technology. Cassettes existed for years before you could play them in a car. The market shifts to CDs, but vehicles come outfitted for cassettes. Finally car CD players become ubiquitous, just as people move on to MP3 players. And most recently, people are streaming their music and assorted programming, but vehicles don't have WiFi. Road trips inevitably require lugging along converter cables and battery operated devices, while never quite achieving good sound quality. Will this be a problem for the ages?

2.) As the years goes by, the drive seems a lot less interesting. For decades America has been losing its charming roadside regionalisms. Gas stations are identical. Truck stops are homogeneous. Road-side commerce is indistinguishable from state to state. Local accents are getting thinned. Food options are virtually all provided by trans-national companies. The trek across America is pretty dull.

3.) One amusing thing is witnessing the out-of-nowhere cultural phenomenon of fast food restaurant combinations. One of the best songs of this summer turned the restaurant combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell into an adorable call and response anthem. But the truck stop allows it to reach inspiring heights: We saw combination Hardy's n' KFC. Subway n' Dunkin Donuts. Baskin Robbins and Godfathers. And my favorite: Taco Bell and Long John Silvers–in a stand-alone restaurant, not just the truck stop combo where restaurants share a mutual soda fountain but have separate kitchens. Stand alone. Yeah, I'll have a side of fiesta chimichangas with my deep fried Alaskan flounder platter. Awesome!

4.) The romance of the road still does not help the Taco Bell or the Long John Silvers taste any better.

5.) The speed limit in Nebraska and Wyoming is 75 mph. In parts of Utah it is 80! Holy Shit, that's fast, when you're driving a Uhaul and a trailer. There's a see-through sticker in the Uhaul that says “Slow down, Speed Kills.” You don't notice it pasted on the speedomoter, until the needle rises above 70 mph and disappears behind those words. Good move, Uhaul.

6.) There are still an absurdly large number of roadside fireworks vending structures with giant signs (the painted sides of these large warehouses!) that visually assault you along the interstate off-ramps from Kentucky to Nebraska. Can someone explain how these businesses are financially viable what with only one 4th of July per year?

7.) I remember on a long-ago bus trip through Morocco thinking: Wow, even in this part of the world, the road is marked by wooden poles carrying power lines, fences marking off people's private land, and plastic bags caught in those fences–the same man-made tropes I'd witnessed everywhere else I've ever traveled. Now, I add to that the presence of Giant Wind Generators. I'd seen them for years in California. Now they dot the road side in Nebraska, Colorado, and Utah. It's only time before they are everywhere.

8.) East to West coast is the best road trip direction. The sublime reenactment of America's grand manifest-destiny expansion. And across the miles the change of terrain from East to West is a glorious revelation.

9.) The possibilities of local radio still surprise me: Years ago living in New Mexico, I remember driving through Shiprock a couple times a year and picking up KNDN (get it?) that played Navajo tribal chants alongside Elvis and Dolly Parton. There is a radio station in Nebraska that does nothing but broadcast a DJ moderating a Craigslist-like show. People call in with items they have for sale or for barter and she repeats their description and their phone number, then moves on to the next caller and their item. Truck tires, rifles, dogs, lawn-mower repair, chicken feed, stereo equipment, elk meat, pest control services. It is awesome! I wanted to have it playing while I was busy in my garage rebuilding the engine of my John Deere tractor. I was quite deflated when the signal finally gave out and we went back to stupid boring All Things Considered.

10.) NPR can now be found in every part of every state. For better or worse. Mostly better, I suppose.

11.) Taylor Swift in a statistically insignificant non-placebo based study with an n of approximately 12 states seems to be the far-away most played artist across America.

12.) There are still scary wild-eyed flip-you-off assholes all across America.

13.) There are still really nice get-out-of-their-cars-and-help-you-back-up-your-trailer-jacked-Uhaul-and-then-offer-you-fried-chicken people all across America.

14.) Important: Don't go out of your way to make this trip. Let it be the result of circumstance. Don't go on Grey Hound, or with your parents, or with a toddler. Or without good music. Or without a great travel companion. And, I hate to say it, but substances really do make the trip more special.