Rene M. Agredano

I’m embarrassed to say that like most Americans, Jim and I have done relatively little foreign travel. We’ve been to Spain, Canada and Mexico, and that’s it. But while we do aspire to be globe hoppers, until we feel like we’ve uncovered enough of the best places in this gigantic country of ours, we’ll stick to the highways and byways of America.

Even after two years of living on the road, Jamie Jensen’s book Road Trip USA: Cross Country Adventures on America’s Two Lane Highways has been helping us uncover countless hidden gems along the way. With our limited bookshelf space in the rig, this is one book that we’ll never let go of.

See What’s Really Out There

The newest edition of Road Trip USA has just been released, along with two pocket guides – Road Trip USA Pacific Coast Highway Guide and Road Trip USA Route 66 Guide. If you’re like us, and drive the blue highways instead interstates, while seeking local Mom and Pop cafes and sticking it to Starbucks, you need these books.

Jamie Jensen’s books suggest 11 distinct road trips bisecting the U.S. From north to south, or east to west, the classic routes include The Pacific Coast Highway, Route 66, the Great River Road, and the Appalachian Trail. Detailed maps and clear directions to plenty of points of interest provide for unlimited day trips and side excursions. You’ll also find accurate contact information for lodging, car rental companies, state tourism boards, and road condition numbers.

The best part of Jamie’s books are their emphasis on finding the quirkier, offbeat attractions and towns across America. While there’s enough useful information about major cities and attractions to give you a head start on your research, Road Trip Nation will help you plan more unusual itineraries.

Plan Your Next Offbeat Adventure

The Atomic Tourist, for instance, might select a route from the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, to the Titan Missile Museum in San Xavier, AZ, to Arco, Idaho, home of the remains of the Experimental Breeder Reactor Number One.

Music lovers will enjoy discovering blues festivals in the south, and cowboy gatherings in the West.

Teetotalling travelers can find their way from the wineries of Westfield, NY to Napa, CA, to the world’s biggest six pack in Lacrosse, WI. They’ll also learn to steer clear of Shamrock Texas on St. Patrick’s Day, even though they could kiss an actual piece of the Blarney Stone in that town’s Elmore Park. Why stay away? Because Shamrock is a dry town.

Road Trip USA identifies attractions one might easily otherwise miss, like the birthplace (and burial site) of On the Road author Jack Kerouac, just 20 miles off highway 2 in Lowell, MA. And how else would you know where the geographical center of North America is? (the answer: Rugby, ND). You’ll discover things like just how many places in the U.S. claim to be the home of Paul Bunyan. Statues of the Lumberjack giant can be found from Maine to Minnesota to our old stomping grounds of Northern California.

It’s also a useful tool that teaches you how to properly pronounce town names before you arrive and look like a tourist. Learn how Sequim, WA is really annunciated (“Skwim”), or Cairo, IL (Ki-Ro).

The only problem with Road Trip USA is that there is so much information, if you forget to consult it before planning your itinerary, you could miss important landmarks like we have. For instance, we passed by the World Largest Frying Pan in Long Beach, WA, and in that same trip, drove right through Curt Cobain’s hometown of Abereen, WA (may he rest in peace!) without even knowing it until later when flipping through the book.

Try Jamie’s Handy Pocket Guides for Short Trips

Road Trip USA’s Pacific Coast Highway Guide and the Road Trip USA Route 66 Guide are a neat addition to Jamie’s encyclopedia of quirky attractions. They’re jam packed with useful information, and you won’t have to lug around the biblical-sized Road Trip USA book if you’re just traveling within those geographic areas.

As West Coast natives, we’ve frequented a lot of his selections in the Pacific Coast Highway Guide, and have to say that his descriptions are accurate, truthful and unbiased.

We wish we had these books when we lived on the West Coast, as Jamie reveals stuff about places we’ve been to but were oblivious to some local finds, like the Olympic Game Farm in Washington. We thought it was a repulsive canned hunt farm, but it turns out to be a home to retired Hollywood animal actors!

The Route 66 Guide is also handy for anyone traveling near that famous route. You don’t have to follow it exactly, as Jamie offers lots of tips and ideas for attractions that are within a reasonable distance of the original highway. We especially enjoyed how he lists local indie radio stations for drivers to listen to, which can give you a taste of local flavor far better than any syndicated radio station can.

So turn off that satellite radio, drive off the interstates and onto the blue highways, and go find the real spirit of America, because believe it or not, it is alive and well. You just have to look harder these days to find it. But first, pick up your copy of Road Trip USA today.

Stay tuned for a guest post from Jamie, about ways you can save money on the road while traveling . . .

Being a fulltime RVer is great, because if you miss something good, you can always go back to it again.

Last year we missed the Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering in the West Texas town of Alpine, by just one week. This year, we hightailed it back in time.

The YouTube playlist below includes six movies Jim made from all the footage I shot of performers including Doris Daley, Jeff Gore, Dale and Brittany Burson, Sam Noble and Gail Steiger;

At 23 years and going strong, the Alpine Cowboy Poetry Gathering is the second oldest in America, just one year behind the much larger Elko, Nevada festival. I’ve always wanted to make it to Elko, but it takes place in January, and being in an RV during Elko’s frozen winter isn’t my idea of a good time. Guess that makes me a real city slicker.

Alpine’s vaqueros though, they know when, and how, to hold a festival for wimps like me. While much smaller than Elko’s, Alpine’s is better in my book. The weather’s awesome, the overall price of attending is more affordable, the performers are accessible, and to me, the atmosphere feels a lot more authentic than Elko, which isn’t the nicest town in the world.

The only bummer is that the poetry and music sessions are held on a college campus, and we wish they would’ve had some in bars or in a campfire setting.

Jim isn’t a huge fan of cowboy poetry like I am, but he patiently endured the festival so he could get a good dinner or two out of it (and he did!).

We both fell in love with the town of Alpine itself. It’s small but not too small, real estate is affordable, and the high desert scenery can’t be beat. We plan on heading back there to look for our winter Texas property in the fall.

My fulltime, permanent road trip often takes me to some of the most offbeat and quirky parts of North America. In this post, I provide my perspective on the permanent transient encampment known as Slab City, in the Southern California desert.

Among RVers, no other camping area evokes such intense reactions as Slab City. People either love it, or hate it. There is no gray area among this 640 acre dismantled military base near the Salton Sea.

Made famous by its appearance in the movie “Into the Wild,” Slab City wasn’t on our radar until our friend Skinny Chef asked if we wanted to meet her there. Then coincidentally, I found this blog entry, by a young RVing couple we met back in South Carolina;

“The movie depicts Slab City as this really cool RV hippie community, where people of all ages hang out – peace, love, happiness, rock and roll, and all that. Well yesterday, we drove two hours to Slab City and nothing could be further from the truth.

Slab City is an RV slum, pure and simple. It’s actually really sad – people living in tents and abandon vehicles. There were even remnants of burned down RVs strewn all over the place. It’s amazing to think that people actually live this way in the US – and it’s only 80 miles from swanky Palm Springs.”

This intrigued me. Liz is a nice person and I like her a lot, but the two of us are quite different. I’m crunchy granola and like to keep things simple, while she’s a high flyin’ New Yorker who’s into manicures, and the glamourous life. Once I saw what she thought of Slab City, I figured if she hated it, I’d probably love it.

I was right.

Slab City: The Last Free Place

Do come here with an open mind if you plan to visit. Many people we know would be completely offended by the post-apocalyptic look of the place.

To come here requires someone who is willing to look beyond the surface, to scratch a little deeper at a situation to learn the real story.

What Slab City Is:

• Free camping. It’s a spot of abandoned, state-owned land where hundreds of travelers from all over the world come to stay for free, some permanently, others just to ride out winter. Call us squatters, if you will, since nobody has “official” permission to be here.
• Serious Boondocking. There are no facilities whatsoever: no electricity, water, or trash. Nothing. The closest dump station is 8 miles away.
• Kinda trashy, in places. Yes, there is some garbage and abandoned RVs around. The state doesn’t care about this spot, and the closest city refuses to clean it up since residents don’t pay to be here. It’s up to campers to be responsible for taking trash to town, and like any neighborhood, some people are better about this than others.
• Very Social. There is much to do and see here, including social clubs, a couple of concert stages, a library, an 18 hole golf course, a church, hot springs, and more. We’ve been to two potlucks, and seem to be doing something every night of the week. We’ve never been so active in one location before.

What Slab City Isn’t:

• Lawless. Contrary to how the media portrays it, I don’t feel in any more in danger here than I do in most cities. Sure, there are some sketchy looking characters, but if you keep away from them, they’ll most likely keep away from you. The county sheriff makes regular runs through here, and Border Patrol is constantly driving through.
• Depressing. There is more creativity here than any tidy suburban neighborhood I’ve been to. Residents have contributed many hours of labor to build free amenities like the golf course (with free equipment!), concert stages, church, or the public shower down near the springs. I’m impressed that people would do so much with so little, in such an unforgiving desert environment. Now if they could only get it together to do something about the trash . . .
• Mainstream. It’s as if someone took a sampling of every kind of ethnicity, personality type and mental disorder, and shipped them here. There are international travelers, old folks, musicians, fulltime Rvers, wandering travelers and offroad enthusiasts, all camped out in the same area as drifters, people struggling with addictions, mental illness and/or homelessness. Everyone seems to get along, following a live and let live attitude.

The desert scenery outside Slab City is beautiful, surrounded by a rugged mountain range. On most days, you can look east to the Chocolate Mountains, about 2 miles away, and watch the US Navy spend your tax dollars by practicing bombing runs and playing war games in the air. We took two hour bike rides without seeing another soul.

The other day, Jim went to see Solar Mike, about our solar system. Mike asked Jim “How long are you staying?” Jim replied with “oh, a week or two.” Mike looked at Jim with a knowing look and chuckled… “Yeah, right.”

I think he could tell just by looking at us. The Slab City lifestyle is agreeing with us, and we’re going to find it hard to break camp this week.