Around 2003 I received On The Road by Jack Kerouac from my Godfather as a gift and I proceeded to ignore it until sometime in college when I was forced to read an excerpt of it by a professor.

I fell in love with the Beat movement. It bordered on obsession for a while. A couple friends and I even adopted the aliases from the novel–I was Dean Moriarty, Karlo Marx was Travis, and Matt was Sal Paradise. I guess in some sense these monikers have held up. Matt has remained the most stable among us, Travis has been a professional artist, and I am… a madman. I don’t know what I am, I am whatever I am. A holy conman with a shining mind, maybe. But that’s too self-indulgent.

Anyway, we had planned to drive east together, the three of us, and we were going to pick up a forth, my buddy Stephen, who was living in New Orleans rebuilding destroyed homes after Hurricane Katrina. The plan was for us to stay there for a week or two and help out with rebuilding before collecting Stephen to head east and couch-surf with people we all knew before eventually returning to CA.

Tragedy struck in Stephen’s family and he was forced to head home to be with his family (incidentally, we were passing through Texas at the same time, heading in opposite directions, on opposite ends of the state). Then Matt got in a fairly serious car accident. When the day came, Travis had some substantial issues going on among his family and it seemed as though I was the only person without a good reason not to go… so I went.

The trip was not without some complications, of course. I had 1/4 the budget I expected to have, was a solo driver, and only had the people I personally knew as options to stay with, rather than the larger pool I had been expecting, using other friends’ connections.

So instead of the trip being Los Angeles to New Orleans to Miami and then north to New York and then East along the Canadian border eventually… it was me going straight for Georgia, where I had a place to stay and some people I knew. From there I went to Kentucky to stay with some other friends. I burned through the money I had faster than I expected to, and after Kentucky I headed home because I didn’t have the gas money to finish the trip as a full circumference of the US (nor did I have the time to make it more true to the novel by getting a job and earning my way to where I wanted to go; classes resumed in September so a longer jaunt just didn’t seem feasible–maybe I gave up too easily).

It wasn’t what we expected it to be when we began planning but I am glad I did it all the same.

Below is every photo I took on the trip, except for those that were errors/duplicates. This isn’t just the good photos, this is everything. Minimal processing.

A disclaimer: it’s really hard to drive and take photos using a DSLR at the same time. If I’d had other drivers I’d likely have more/better photos, but as it stands I’d be driving and take a few photos without using the viewfinder, pointed more or less at what I hoped to capture in auto mode. I got as much as I could get, and I mostly wanted to capture the changing of the landscape over time and the… residual elements. Defunct businesses, old pieces of cars, abandoned buildings… why? I don’t know, it’s just an aesthetic I dig. Also, street signs, to keep track of more or less where I was. So, yes, I fully acknowledge an awful lot of these aren’t very good quality, but I don’t really care. They capture an event that was meaningful to me. I find a lot of beauty in even some of the uglier photos. The photos themselves may not have much artistic merit, but the sentimentality I have for them more than makes up for whatever objective value they lack.

Note: Some photos have captions, most do not. For now, they are at the top of the page and difficult to read but if I work it out eventually I’ll put them below the photo and adjacent to it. The format is a little weird right now.