By PATRIC M. VERRONE Special to the Palisadian-Post Some people drive to see the sights along the way. Some do it to relax. Some even do it to get somewhere. In July and August of 2010, my family drove just to see if we could. We drove through all 48 contiguous states, book-ended by flights to Alaska and Hawaii. Fifty states, 25 days, five Verrones. When planning a drive like this, you quickly develop a proficiency at Google Maps, a Stockholm Syndrome affection for hotels.com, and a patriotic loyalty to AAA (though I never had the nerve to tell any single Trip-Tiker about the whole drive for fear they would revoke my membership). Then there was the small matter of convincing the rest of my family to give up a month of their lives to sit in a minivan for an average of six hours a day. My wife Maiya was an early convert (though she would have preferred we do it as retirees), our older son Patric bought in once it was clear he could Facebook from anywhere in America, our daughter Marianne sensed the tide rushing against her and relented, but our brave 10-year-old Teddy held out. But an iPad on his birthday and, on July 27, we were off to Anchorage. The sheer size and scope of Alaska was enough to persuade the kids to stay there for a month, but we still had 49 states remaining, so we took in a few glaciers and a single midnight sunset and set some individual goals: I would collect a refrigerator magnet from every state, Maiya wanted a postcard, Patric would buy a pen, Teddy a stuffed animal and Marianne’well, she didn’t want to feel obliged to buy something. Smart girl. We also intended to take a photo of all of us holding the state flag in every state. We flew to Seattle, met up with my sister Phyllis (a Florida schoolteacher who became known as Aunt Tripod for taking the next 38 flag photos), rented the van and the game was afoot! A foot applied directly to an accelerator pedal for over 172 hours. How do you drive through 48 states? Well, starting in the Pacific Northwest, you go east on the I-90 for nine days, make a right turn at the Atlantic, work your way down the I-95, take consecutive rights at the Gulf of Mexico (first at Pensacola, then New Orleans), and then hang a hard left at St. Louis, westward towards Las Vegas. There are a few detours to pick up stragglers like North Dakota, West Virginia, Kentucky and two of the Four Corners states, but that’s the basic route. The real challenge of driving 21 days doesn’t fully hit home until you pull into the rental car return lane at the Vegas airport and the attendant says, ‘You drove 9,154 miles. Your contract allowed for … unlimited mileage. Have a nice day.’ The 21st-century road trip is nothing like the days of staring at cornfields and Burma Shave signs. The information superhighway runs parallel to the interstate. We frequently smelled burning plastic caused by overloading three cigarette lighters with the many adapters charging my Droid telephone (supplying us with wireless Internet), my Sony Vaio laptop, our Magellan GPS, three iPhones (one connected to the radio to broadcast ballgames and music), and four MacBooks’to watch DVDs and play two simultaneous versions of Sims 3. Also, there was our blog, which we updated nearly daily. It’s still available at http://pverrone.wordpress.com/. There are certain things that kids growing up in the Pacific Palisades learn when they see the rest of America. They see that people most everywhere else eat too much. They realize that cornfields are ubiquitous. They learn words like ubiquitous. I learned some things, too. There is a lot of road construction in the summer up north. There are many more Su’bway restaurants than there are subway stations (by an order of magnitude). Don’t speed in Texas. As for our personal goals, we learned early in the trip that some state borders don’t have welcome centers; welcome centers don’t stay open very late during fiscally challenging times like these; even when welcome centers are open, many don’t have gift shops; and not all gift shops carry postcards, magnets, stuffed animals and pens. There is so much more to report, including crossing paths with President Obama’s motorcade (we did!), falling into Niagara Falls (we didn’t!) and the bounty of American cuisine from the original Starbucks to Roy Rogers to McDonald’s; from Alaska caribou burgers to Maine lobsters; from chocolate-coated potato chips in Fargo to sugar-coated beignets in New Orleans; from thirty flavors of cheesecake in Manhattan to 60 varieties of Coke in Atlanta; from a two-gallon ice cream sundae in Boston to a 72-ounce steak in Amarillo. Our final reward was four days on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. All told, we clocked 18,677 miles by plane, car and even boat. Maiya collected a full complement of postcards and Teddy found 49 stuffed animals (missing only one from Kansas, which he was able to later order on eBay). I gathered 48 magnets (of which I have also now have a full set), Patric got 26 pens and we took 50 state flag photos (out of over 1,200 photos overall). We arrived home at 5 a.m. on August 24, eliciting sighs of relief and a few groans when I announced, ‘We’ll have even more fun next year when we do it in reverse!’ (Patric M. Verrone is a television writer/producer whose current credit is ‘Futurama.’ He was president of the Writers Guild of America West from 2005 to 2009. Maiya Williams Verrone is a novelist and TV writer whose latest book is ‘The Fizzy Whiz Kid.’ Patric C.W. Verrone is a sophomore at Harvard-Westlake where he is involved in theater. Marianne Verrone is an eighth grader at Corpus Christi School and captain of the academic decathlon team. Teddy Verrone is a fifth grader at Corpus Christi and now wants an iPad 2.)
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