Andrew Smith's Reviews > Slow Road to San Francisco

English writer David Reynolds starts his journey at Ocean City, Maryland. It’s a place I’ve never heard of but it’s one end of America’s Route 50, a 3000 mile road that that once traversed the country, ending (or beginning, depending from which side you begin your journey) at San Francisco. On the map the route looks like a pretty straight line, passing through Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. He’s completing the journey alone, taking as much of the original road as possible and he’ll be taking his time, driving for around seven weeks.

Reynolds is good company as he travels sans Sat-Nav and therefore frequently gets lost. This isn’t helped by the fact that he has to navigate himself around regular interruptions to his chosen path. He stays at cheap hotels, accommodation he hasn’t booked in advance as he’s not sure where he’ll be at the end of any given day. In the evenings he usually grabs a stool at the bar in a promising looking joint and grabs a beer or two as he chats to locals about his journey, their life and Donald Trump.

Set in the year 2000, Trump is in the White House and the author is clearly not a fan, being a self-confessed middle-class, white, liberal. In fact most of the people he chats to aren’t Trump fans either, though some of them confessed that they did vote for him. It seems that many found the appeal of Hilary Clinton to be even less attractive than that of The Donald. Many, it seems, liked neither and chose not to vote at all.

En route, he visits a good number of museums, meets some interesting people (nearly everyone he meets being extraordinarily friendly) and reflects on the history of the places he passes through. I’ve read quite a bit about ‘manifest destiny’ and the Westward expansion, but this book still filled in some gaps in my knowledge. But above all, the author filled me with the pleasure of the journey – his journey. I loved the pure adventure of it. I’ve taken one road trip of around 2500 miles through parts of California, Nevada and Arizona and I’d love to take another trip, plotting a very different route. This book fuelled my ambition no end.