Keep on truckin’

Here’s a hypothetical: You plan a family vacation that ends with a three-day train ride across the United States. But a few hours into the train ride, a conductor announces that a train has derailed ahead of you. Amtrak says it’ll put everyone on buses, but those buses won’t arrive for hours. And it’s unclear whether they’ll take you all the way home or just to the next big city.

Would you:

A) Wait for the bus and ride it as far as it will take you, at no cost.

B) Book plane tickets, for an eye-popping price.

C) Rent a car and take a leisurely road trip, stopping along the way to enjoy local color and rest.

D) Rent a car and drive virtually nonstop, as if you were in some sort of cross-country road race.

Actually, this is not a hypothetical. It happened to me 10 days ago. My wife, 8-year-old son and I had spent a week in Tucson, Ariz., before being dumped off the train in El Paso, some 2,000 miles from our home in New Jersey. We unanimously chose Option D. We had packed plenty of snacks for the train ride. We had the Harry Potter audiobooks cued up. We’re cheapskates, and up for a challenge.

By the time we secured a rental car (a black 2026 Hyundai Elantra), bought a cheap booster seat ($35) at Target and loaded our luggage, the sun was already setting. Google Maps said it would take us 32 hours to get home. Exhausted from the stress of the train debacle, we pulled off the road in Pecos, Texas, and got a room at the Hilton for the night ($127). It would be our last real stop.

On the road

Between the western and eastern ends of Texas, from El Paso to Texarkana, lie 812 miles of highway. The road cuts through the desert first, then into a vast flatness pocked by oil derricks. The surroundings eventually transform to scrubland, then prairies and finally forests in full summer bloom. Each passing hour — and there are lots of hours — seems to bring more green, more life, more breath.

To state the obvious, and to out myself as a lifelong East Coaster, Texas is far too big. I was surprised, though, that it was never boring. The evolving landscape, the billboards, the enchanting narration of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” — it all provoked the kind of endless chitchat that bonds loved ones.

Arriving in Arkansas around 7 p.m., and not wanting to slow our momentum, we decided to pick up a pizza and eat in the car. The nearest Domino’s was a few minutes off the highway, in a town called Hope. As we neared the shop, I noticed a humble house surrounded by a fence, with a brown sign denoting a landmark: the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. Neat, I thought, and we slowed down enough to snap a picture out the window. No, we didn’t stop. Google Maps said we had 20 hours to go.

A marathon road trip in 2026 means constantly confronting the clock. I’m reliant on my phone to guide me, and my phone insists that if I want to see the directions, I must also see how much time remains. I know, intellectually, that it takes 60 minutes — 3,600 seconds, I could count them if it’d help — for that travel time to tick down to 19 hours from 20. But when you stare at it, the number never seems to budge.

We hit Tennessee around 11 p.m. I had agreed to drive through the night, and the Volunteer State’s 440-mile expanse ate up most of my eight hours at the wheel. Somewhere east of Nashville, twisting through the Cumberland Plateau, the population of tractor-trailers thinned out and I found myself alone on the road. With my wife and kid asleep, I blasted the Grateful Dead. My thoughts, artificially enhanced by a citrus-flavored Red Bull, seemed to merge with the trees and the sky and the white lines of the road blurring by. I didn’t even register Google’s E.T.A.

By the time we passed into Virginia, with the sun cracking over the southern Appalachians, our drive time had dwindled to eight hours. We were in the homestretch; compared with 32 hours, eight is like a trip to the grocery store. We knew we were going to make it.

Taking stock

Twelve years ago, when my future wife and I had been dating for less than a year, we drove from New Jersey to the Grand Canyon and then up to Portland. Our relationship was solidified in the stress of marathon drives, of sharing the road with eighteen-wheelers, of having nothing but our playlists and conversation to occupy our minds. The trust required to close your eyes and recline your seat as someone else takes the wheel for the night, it seems to me, is connected to the trust it takes to share a life with someone.

We saw some cool stuff on that drive, sure — the Gateway Arch, the Four Corners, the redwoods. But what we really saw was each other. In retrospect, I’m grateful for that derailed train, because it gave us a chance to see each other in this distinct way again. And our son, watching the country go by from the back seat, got to see us, too. Mom and Dad, trusty at the wheel, when he closed his eyes on a dark highway, and again when he opened them the next morning.

Related (sort of): Stephen Hiltner, a Travel editor at The Times, took a road trip of his own, traversing 2,448 miles of Route 66 by motorcycle over 14 days (he made a lot more stops). See what he saw.

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