When one of my oldest & best friends told me she would be moving across the country, I of course volunteered to make the 2900-mile drive with her.

We drove nearly all of I-80 over the course of four days—from San Francisco to Roxbury Township, NJ, where we exited to drive south to our final destination. It was late and by that time we didn’t have it in us to drive the extra 45 minutes to Teaneck, NJ (where I-80 ends) before heading south to New Brunswick.

Some logistics:

✨ I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as far as traveling during a pandemic goes. I was pretty impressed with mask-wearing in other states. (& Utah’s electronic highway message boards— “ARRIVE ALIVE THEN WEAR YOUR MASK” 👏 Indoor dining was open in many places but we only got takeout. We mostly stopped at grocery stores for bathrooms as that felt cleaner than gas stations? Overall it felt pretty low-risk. (We weren’t traveling for “fun” (though we had a lot of fun 🙃) & I’m certainly not saying it’s time to do that yet!)

✨ Every day we got up at 6am and were usually on the road with coffees in hand by 6:45am. One of my favorite things was watching the sunrise & sunset from the road 😍

✨ We each drove about 5-6 hours per day, and passed the time by listening to our “I-80 East” Spotify playlist made for us by Micah’s boyfriend (this was the very appropriate first song), listening to podcasts (this one was a favorite, & this one), chatting, or doing a Daily Cal crossword puzzle together.

✨ We only made 1-3 stops per day. I brought banana nut muffins to eat for breakfast, we each brought plenty of snacks, and once we stopped for the night we would get takeout from a restaurant and eat in our hotel room.

✨ None of our hotels were booked in advance. Each night we’d just figure out where we’d be around sunset and then find a hotel with good ratings & book a room from the car.

I’m surprised at how fast the trip felt. We decided road trips are completely different when you’re in charge vs. when you’re a kid in the back seat, haha. When we finally arrived, we both said we’d make the same trip with each other again in a heartbeat :) And we already have ideas for another road trip! 😏

Here’s the recap of our days, with a mix of DSLR & phone photos.

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