Breakfast at the Exit Cafe. Wayne Grady

      Contents

Preface

1 / Megalopolis, USA

2 / Astoria

3 / Highway 101

4 / Eureka! California

       5 / Route 66

       6 / Grand Canyon, Arizona

       7 / The Marriage Road

       8 / Escalante, Utah

       9 / El Camino Real

       10 / Jefferson, Texas

       11 / Selmalabama

       12 / Athens, Georgia

       13 / The Outer Banks

       14 / The Exit Cafe

       Acknowledgements

PREFACE

      WE didn’t set out to write a book. We were in Vancouver, intending to drive back to Ontario in our green Toyota Echo, and we decided to take the long way home, down along the Pacific coast, across the southern states, then up the Atlantic seaboard. It was to be a holiday, an excursion. It was just before Christmas 2006, and we were keen to avoid driving across the Prairies in winter. We were naive. We were curious. We wanted to see the mountains of Washington and the forests of Oregon, the deserts of California and Arizona and New Mexico, the canyonlands of Utah, the arid farmlands of Texas, the troubled cities of Mississippi and Alabama, the exhausted plantations of Georgia and Virginia, the great, wind-beaten banks of the Carolinas. We thought this would be relaxing, a break from our writing lives.

      We should have known better. Put two writers together in a car and keep them there for a couple of months, and it’s more than likely you’ll get a book. But what kind of book would it be? Both of us grew up, for the most part, in southern Ontario, close to the American border, although neither of us had travelled much in the United States. What we knew of America had come from America, not from our own experience of that country. We knew what Americans looked like and sounded like; we knew how they acted and sang and wrote. What we didn’t know was what they were like at home.

      We had no itinerary, no agenda. We didn’t stick to the interstates, as Larry McMurtry did when he wrote Roads; we didn’t drive only on smaller highways, as William Least Heat-Moon did in Blue Highways. The routes we travelled were blue and red and white and yellow on the maps, solid lines and dotted lines and sometimes no lines at all. We didn’t tell anyone we were coming: we were neighbours who were dropping in unexpectedly, wanting only a cup of coffee and some conversation.

      By the time we got home, we had driven more than fifteen thousand kilometres; travelled through twenty-two states; put on twenty pounds each; replaced half the car; slept in mom-and-pop motels, boutique hotels, dreary motor inns, the car; eaten in diners, cafes, bistros, five-star restaurants, chain eateries, food courts, the car. Our favourite meal of the day was breakfast, because eating breakfast every day in a restaurant is one kind of proof that you’re on the road. And everyone else in there is travelling, too. Part of the reason we chose the title of our book is that the places we had breakfast took on for us a kind of iconic status. Like America itself, they became, for a time, our home.

      John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, his book about driving the rim of America, wrote that “people don’t take trips, trips take people.” He was right. This trip

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