"The Road is Life:" at least, someone said that once.

WEST SACRAMENTO—The great American road trip is probably never going to happen.

I’m staring at 30 and I’m at the point where I can’t do something like that unless something drastic in life changes. It might be another couple of decades before I get to traverse the country in search of some mythic America that exists only in booze-inspired novels, film and music. Plus, the pages of history have already passed. With the super highways that cross the continent, would it really be the same to travel the country by road? Who even does that anymore, other than those looking for or forced into a new life?

If interstate-5 in California—or the California Route 99 that I traversed today—are any indication, the quaint little road-side stands, the eccentric road-side stands (how can a farm be a vintage cheese shop and sell fruit at the same time?) and hidden towns are all becoming an afterthought as freeways and highways are being rebuilt to go past these places. Never mind the fly over states—in California there are now drive-thru towns. Places like Delano, Pixler and Madera. I’m sure that the population signs don’t lie, but I cannot imagine people actually living in these places. Unless you have been granted the privilege of water in the Central Valley, everything around you is brown, lifeless and void of civilization. In Fresno, as I made a stop for a bite to eat, you can see houses boarded up, storefronts vacated and transients begging for food. On the surface, this is where the California dream does not exist. But dig deeper in San Francisco and LA and you will see the same things—the empty storefronts, the run-down houses, the countless number of people looking for a place to sleep.

You come to a point in your life when you realize that you can’t do all the things you wanted to do. Life gets in the way. You find yourself in a groove at a job you hopefully like. You might get married. You might have (please don’t) have kids. Eventually, the chains are placed upon you, whether you want them to or not. And then we do things to try to cast off those chains.

To travel American with its ghost in my passenger seat was always—not a dream—but a hope of mine. I’ve wanted to drive from the Pacific to Atlantic, wanted to see the Great Plains, traverse the South, cut through the Rockies. That may never happen. But at least I can do this trip. Something that is probably less than one-tenth of what I could have done. I can travel up-and-down the Left Coast of America and see the wonders that it holds—and think, “If I had done this on the other side of America, I could have seen at least 10 different states.”