Above: Roadeo, shown paused at a scoreless tie; or, the road trip metaphor I’ve been waiting for. Link via Austin Kleon.

A few notes on the upcoming annual Yanksgiving road trip to Florida.

1. Our drive south will involve two overnight stays; the drive back north just one, if all goes well. In between, we have a four-night reservation at a nice-ish Florida hotel that we’ve been to before. But it’s the prospect of the reservationless, transient eight-to-ten-hour overnight stops in the interstate Marriotts or Holiday Inns or Best Westerns that are in my mind more, now, before the trip. Check in, sleep, check out, disappear. A low-level escapist thrill from that sense of provisional locatedness, the allure of just passing through, etc., etc.

   Many sense-memories of overnight road-trip way stations have stayed with me, amassed from the past decade’s worth of annual cross-country drives, Virginia to Texas, Virginia to Florida, Ontario to Virginia, Ontario to Florida. They are basically all the same memory. Staggering into a nighttime hotel lobby in a carlagged stupor, being checked in by a late-shift desk ghost, collapsing into an anonymous, starchy hotel bed, passing out beneath a lulling soundtrack of highway traffic, under-window heat/AC, and parking lot altercations.

   A less wide-eyed way to put the above is that I am guilty of a type of naïve, oblivious travel-slumming. I’m able to find this stuff interesting/evocative/memorable/whatever because I drive long distances by choice rather than by necessity, and I do it seldom enough for it to seem a fun, safe, pseudo-adventurous novelty, rather than an exhausting, soul-annihilating, life-and-limb-threatening slog across a country that sometimes never seems to want to end.

2. Though we do this trip every year, we try to take different routes when possible, stop in different places. While using Google Maps to plan our route and Google Street View to check out hotels and restaurants and stores in our path, I’m once again setting myself up to experience the phenomenon of Déjà Street View — driving or walking around a location one has never been to before, but which one nonetheless has an uncanny, detailed familiarity with after having explored it in advance on Street View. It’s happened to you too, I know.

3. My attitude toward these cross-country road trips, though I do enjoy them, has been given perfect metaphorical expression by a recently-released online game called Roadeo. Actually it is a pretty solid metaphor for life in general. It is a two-player racing game in which one player drives a car on a road, and the other player plays as the road. The road is imagined as a sentient, active entity, unrolling just in front of the car, constantly changing its direction and slope, and its object is to make the car drive off the road and die. The car’s object is, simply, to stay on the road. Who will win? Car or road? Car or road?? A very good philosophical question. In the long run I think we all know the answer. (There is also a cooperative gameplay mode in which car and road team up and work together, but road-trip-wise this only seems symbolic of the first few hours of driving each day, in good weather, surrounded by scenic landscapes, and after a fine greasy diner breakfast.)