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But Why A Road Trip? - Summer 2022 Article Series

bethanycuenod

The first thing I thought about when I was able to get out in the world again during the pandemic was: "I'm going to go drive across the country for several weeks without a plan and I'm going to do it by myself and sleep in my car." My first thought was, I think I might eat outside at a restaurant instead of ordering take-out from it.


After getting vaccinated and having the existential dread of risking my life every time I chose to go to the grocery store melt away, I knew that I wanted to get out of my bubble and run far away. But that’s hard to do when you’re working full time and don’t like to spend your vacation days. Especially if you’re like me and have irrational anxiety about spending your vacation days on vacation, what if you get sick and need to use them there.*


*Picture a squirrel hoarding what is ostensibly too many nuts for winter in Texas. That’s usually me with my vacation days.


It’s also fairly hard when you don’t want to get on a plane because even though you’re vaccinated, you’ve inundated yourself with so much information that though you feel comfortable going to the grocery store with your N95 for less than an hour, the idea of sitting next to people in a tube for 4 to 5 hours still sounds a bit unreasonable and unsafe.


But on top of that is that even though I wasn’t in the office and had been working from home for over a year, how would I make working from anywhere… work? There are issues with connectivity and working on a tiny notebook when you’ve just got your home office set up the way you want it, and the idea of having to pack up your ‘office’ every day without the same place to work just sounds unreasonable. Especially because I have a sweet set-up at home with triple monitors, a sit/stand desk, an ergonomic mouse, and an RGB, pink mechanical keyboard (which I’m certain several of my coworkers were glad they didn't have to hear every day in person).*


*I’ll have a post talking about more of my hardware tools soon, but I couldn’t resist teasing some of the details here. I do love my setup.


So when talking about remote work, I would say working from home is easy. I've been working in, what we now refer to as, a hybrid-style environment for almost three years. However, if you'd asked me three years ago how I would have described my style, I'd tell you that I work in an office and that sometimes I can work from home because I occasionally have to take calls at night. After all, I work with people from all over the world being in the office at 9 pm to take said calls doesn't exactly sound like my cup of tea. I wouldn't have said any words like 'remote' or 'hybrid' to describe it, but funny how a few years and some new word combos change how we frame things.


So back when the pandemic 'started' in the US around March of 2020, I was already fairly well prepared, at least from a hardware perspective, to work outside of the office. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked when I needed to be at home. Heck, I'd been working for a week from home about a month prior because I came down with a sinus infection and didn't want to bring it into the office. This should arguably be the norm that people operate. Don't spread your germs around when you aren't feeling well.*


*I do know not every job has this luxury, but if your work can be accomplished 80% remotely, you shouldn't come in when you're sick.* Getting 80% accomplished for the duration of your illness to prevent other people from getting sick is probably a good trade-off.


*You shouldn't work while you're sick in general, but that's a different story for a different series of articles


What I wasn't prepared for is how trapped I would feel after a year of not being able to go anywhere, for work or pleasure. It's readily apparent to anyone who meets me, remote or otherwise, that I am a giant extrovert. I get joy from being around and interacting with others and those interactions can be some of the highlights of my week. One of the main concerns I had about taking a road trip wasn't how to get work done remotely, though that was a part of it, but how I was supposed to be ok with being alone for most of my trip. Not being able to do that in person during the first part of the pandemic was expected, but still having to figure out how to build a community more than a year into it was difficult and possibly making that harder by traveling by myself across the country was almost overwhelming.*


*I probably should have been more concerned about the fact that I was a young woman traveling alone across the country and all of the normal perils that can happen with that. I can guarantee that this was what my mother was thinking about when I told her I was taking this trip.


Truthfully, I didn't plan to take a working road trip at first. I just wanted to get out and go places again. The idea of traveling across the country on a working road trip kind of came to fruition through, for lack of a better word, scheming on my part. I had been invited to visit my friend in Michigan who'd moved there the previous year and said that I should come to visit when I got the chance*


*I am the kind of person who if you say "you should come to visit sometime" I will follow up with you and try to make said plans to come to see you, so be genuinely generous.


However, Michigan is a bit of a way from Texas, to say the least. Most people don’t know this, but it takes FOREVER just to get out of Texas.* I was originally going to go up and see her for the weekend, but with the plane and vacation days issues mentioned above, I wasn’t sure how best to do it. That and if I had flown, she was more than two hours from the nearest major airport kind of felt like a bit of a waste on both of our sides. The cost/value analysis was not favorable.**


*If you left from Houston and drove to the Texas/Arkansas border, which is appropriately named Texarkana, it would take you almost 8 hours. That’s a whole day of just driving to get to a state that borders you! It’s insane.


** As an adult, apparently you put a dollar value on your time and that’s something I still have trouble accepting, even though it’s been beneficial outside of the office environment.


So I decided to drive and because I have several friends in the Midwest after having gone to school in Illinois during my grad program, I thought that since I'd be 'passing through their neck of the woods' why not stop by and say hi. This is about what my trip ended up being mapped out to be:



In retrospect, I should have planned more for this trip, but I was naïve and just wanted to travel so I over-indexed on my in-the-moment problem-solving abilities, set up a few solid destinations, and drove. The only solid destinations were where I was going to sleep for the first few nights, and when I'd be staying with friends. I had a general idea of how I’d get to each location, but I was flying by the seat of my pants for most of it. The only real rules I had for myself during my travels were:

  1. Find a place with signal so I could hotspot and work and

  2. If I wasn't staying at a friend's place, book a nearby campsite to sleep

Those rules ended up serving me super well on my adventure, but there were a lot of things out of my control that I ended up finding out.


I'll talk more about it during my next post, but I feel if I keep talking now, you’ll end up thinking, I’ll come back to this post later and never finish it. So I’m going to thank you for stopping by and reading the first one and hope that you’ll come back for the second post where I will expand more on how I made it work wherever I found myself and the makeshift desks I created.


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nancy.blaker
May 24, 2022

Great article!!!! We road-tripped up to Montana during covid! Looking forward fo future articles for tips and tricks!

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