So I totally forgot the big five-year anniversary celebration I had planned.

I began my American Road Trip (for lack of a better term) five years ago yesterday, driving from New Jersey to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. To celebrate, I'm going to revisit those days over the next six weeks ... starting Sunday. Well, I can do the first two entries today and then look back on the July 5 post on Sunday, since we're leaving tonight for Pennsylvania � LANK-aster tonight and Johnstown tomorrow.

And so it began (click on the map for the entry) ...

Little Silver to Cambridge

Looking back on it now, having owned my 2000 Pontiac Grand Am for three years now (and having just hit 66,666 on my odometer yesterday), the 1986 Volvo 240 station wagon I took to California and back is one of the top five quintessential road trip cars. It has to be. It had manual windows and semi-automatic doorlocks (by using the key in the driver's side door, or by pushing down on the lock while seated in the driver's seat), no cruise control and crude air conditioning that didn't so much cool off the interior of the car as blow cool air on people in the front seat. I grow more fond of the good times with that car with every passing year. But there was no way I could've kept it. By the time I traded it in for the Grand Am (well, for maybe three wheels on the Grand Am), it was a shade under 200,000 miles (that kills me, that I didn't cross that threshold after having owned it from the 114,006 mark � wow, I still remember the number), the right front door was rusting badly, and there were recurring problems with the transmission fluid and hoses and other things that were getting pretty expensive to repair. I put in close to $1,000 having that car fixed during the first five months of 2000.

So it was time for it to go. But it served me well, making the trip to Notre Dame and back four times during my junior and senior years, not to mention a few jaunts up to Massachusetts, some side trips to Memphis, Tennessee and Chicago. After college, I took it to Detroit, North Carolina, Maine and D.C.

On the trip, however, it rode along the ridges of the Appalachians, cruised down to the Mississippi Delta, made it along a narrow cliffside road to a New Mexico ghost town, through Death Valley, across the Kaibab Plateau of Northern Arizona, across the red-rock-rimmed roads of Utah, across the Rockies, up the highest paved road in North America and through the corn, wheat and sunflower fields of the American Midwest. I packed it well and with a purpose: towels served to cover my cargo from the wind through the open windows and the scorching sun in the West. I also managed to not stick to the plastic seats by putting a beach towel down before settling in for a drive. At each stop, I'd freeze a bottle of water overnight to assure myself of always having cold water to drink through the next day, and I put the cooler behind the passenger seat on the floor, allowing me to reach in and rummage around for a Coke or a cookie or whatever else I knew I had back there.

That car was my home on the road. For six weeks I stayed with friends and family and four nice motel managers, but I always had some time and space to myself whenever I closed the creaking door of the car, put in one of the dozens of tapes I brought with me, consulted the map and pulled away from one destination on the way to another. One of my few regrets from the trip was that I never spent a night in the car. It was a station wagon, by god, and I could've easily pulled off the road into a campground in Virginia or Alabama or Colorado, reorganized my packing, put down the back seat, unrolled my sleeping bag (which I barely used on the trip) and enjoyed a night to myself beneath the trees.

Not a week goes by when I don't dream of coming into a significant pile of large-denomination U.S. currency, quit my job and head out on the road again, discovering more of America and writing about it to keep some kind of income flowing, even though (with my windfall fantasy) I don't need it. But I manage to satisfy this regular wanderlust with periodic weekend jaunts up or down the Atlantic coast and a summer excursion just about every year since. I don't see a prolonged trip on the docket for this summer, but I should be able to manage. I had a week in Florida in February and another week in Seattle coming up in November, and I think I'll survive a year without a road trip that takes me 600 or more miles from home.

I should use the occassion of this five-year anniversary to finally scan a sample of the photos from the trip and upload them for display here. I should have a photo of my own blue '86 Volvo to use as a visual aid rather than trying to search (obviously with no positive results) for one online. I should make sure I do that when we get back from Western PA.

But I will definitely use this anniversary to look back on my days on the road, to supplement what I wrote then with observations in the present, tinted with the added experiences of four more summers.

And I will remind myself that I'll be out there on the road again someday, winding my way from the Atlantic to the Pacific � and maybe farther.