The Anatomy of a 105-Day U.S. Adventure Part 1: The Numbers

Note about this three-part series: After I returned home in December 2023, a few car-loving friends pointed out that I had never truly summarized my US road trip. “We know how many miles you drove,” they said, “but where’s the rest of it? The map? The details?” Now, as I prepare for my 2026 European adventure, it feels like the right moment to revisit that journey—to finally gather the numbers, the stories, and the lessons learned before I set out again. I hope you enjoy this recap ride.

When I was young, I often rode with my father to the gas station to fill up our Ford station wagon. I sat in the front seat—before mandatory seat belts, air bags, or child seats—buzzing with anticipation. My father stood outside the car, chatting with the station attendant as I peered through the window, watching the analog pump numbers flip with a steady clink clink, the whir of the pump providing a low, reassuring background hum.

I loved the ritual after the numbers stopped flipping and the sounds ceased. When the pump clicked off, I opened the glove box and retrieved a small spiral notebook with its worn cardboard cover and dog-eared pages, along with a stubby pencil. When my father got back in the car, I handed the notebook and pencil over with great solemnity and watched as he carefully recorded the date, gallons purchased, and odometer reading in neat, deliberate block print on the next fresh line.

This buried memory resurfaced the night before my U.S. road trip. On the last day of August 2023, as I was finalizing preparations to get on the road the next morning, I pulled out my sketchbook and marked off the final pages by writing Mileage Log at the top of each. Visions of my father’s small notebook returned to me in a flash and the echo of that childhood ritual filled me with unexpected comfort. And because this was 2023 and not 1970, I also opened my laptop and created an Excel spreadsheet with columns for date, odometer reading, location, and gallons.

During those 105 days on the road, I logged every fill-up (72 in total). Each Sunday, before writing my weekly essay, I entered the numbers into the spreadsheet. Simple formulas tallied the miles driven each day and tracked my progress across the country.

I am a romantic through and through, but I do love my data. And as the days went on, I began thinking of other things I could track: the number of hotels, the bad weather days, the National Parks visited. I added categories that offered answers to the questions asked by fellow Porsche owners; Do you park in garages or in lots? How many times have you broken down? (The Blue Car is still annoyed about this query.) How many bad weather days did you have?

By the end of the trip, the data took on a life of its own, quantifying my trip in stark black and white.

My trip by the numbers?

• Total days: 105

• Total miles: 14,076

• Different hotels/lodging: 55

• Hotel parking lots: 86 nights

• Garage parking: 14 nights

• On-street parking: 4 nights

• Longest drive: 566 miles (Elko, NV → Bend, OR)

• Shortest drive: 3 miles (from my hotel to the mechanic in Jackson, WY)

• No-driving days: 19

• Rainy days: 5

• Snowy days: 3

• National Parks: 10

• Average fuel consumption: 20.5 MPG

• Fill-ups: 72

• Oil changes: 3

• Breakdowns: 0 (doubt the Blue Car at your own peril)

• Repairs: 1

• Days at the mechanic: 3

• Flat tires: 2 (both caused by broken valves)

• Fastest flat change: 32 minutes (still proud of this)

These orderly, neat numbers sit in my mind as I am in full preparation mode for my 2026 trip. My bedroom looks like a room ransacked—bags, clothes, camera equipment everywhere—and there, on top of one of the piles, is a fresh sketchbook. As I open to the last pages and make my columns for daily mileage and fill-ups, I wonder, what compels me to record my trip in this way? To collect data to review later, to report back? What drives any of us to record the minutiae of our lives?

While I didn’t consciously think about the meaning of the numbers at the time, looking back, I can see it clearly: the data offered me the comforting illusion of control and certainty.

Until that trip, I traveled alone for more than five days only once. My life has been full of companions. When I was younger, there were school trips and then travels with friends. Later, I traveled with my husband and then with the kids. It wasn’t until my youngest headed off to a gap semester and then college in the fall of 2023 that I could imagine taking time for myself in this expansive way.

I wasn’t nervous about the solo nature of it all, the alone time. I had no concern for my safety. And I trusted the reliability of the Blue Car. But I did wonder how it would feel to step into a version of myself who could do anything or nothing at all, with no one to answer to and no roles to play.

I’d had a small taste of that feeling before the pandemic, during a three-day solo wander through Stockholm after a work trip to participate in a panel discussion at the Royal Institute of Technology. Tacking personal travel time on to a work trip was rare for me; in my packed life of running a consulting firm, teaching, and being mom at home, days away traveling upset the balance. On that first day after the work event, I walked the city, enjoying a sunny June day, constantly catching myself imagining what my kids would enjoy—Louis roaming the Viking Ship Museum, Isaac exploring Scandinavian design shops, Jane photographing the picturesque cityscape. It took nearly a whole day to stop ruminating on what I would do with them, and to acknowledge they weren’t with me. And then to ask the important thing:

What did I want to do?

The question was uncomfortable at first, a bad fit. Like trying on someone else’s clothes.

Leaving for a 105-day solo road trip meant stepping into that discomfort again—but on a much bigger scale.

I was also trying on a new identity. I wondered (and worried) about how it would feel to step back from work to make that trip. I had been working since I was 15 years old, sometimes multiple jobs simultaneously. How would it feel to shift focus from the productiveness and usefulness that had defined my entire adult life to another existence that was unfamiliar to me? An existence of meandering and seemingly purposeless exploration.

The numbers, the spreadsheets, the tidy columns—I think they were my way of steadying myself against the unknown. Of helping give definition to Susan in transition. A way to feel anchored while learning how to inhabit this new skin and enjoy the strange and unfamiliar freedom of not reporting to anyone, of focusing on my own desires and whims. I suspect many of us do this when facing uncharted territory. Whether it’s a phone constantly in our hands linking us to our families and friends through a quick text or photo share, or the familiar structure of a morning run or diary entry, we embrace comforting talismans and rituals that ground us in the known and expected when in new circumstances.  

But here's the truth: the numbers only hint at what the trip really was.

They show motion—lots of it. They reflect decisions I didn’t plan to make when I was preparing for my trip, like moving nearly every night because staying put felt wrong when the Blue Car was raring to go and the open road stretched in front of me. And that 14,076? It tells you I wandered without a straight line, driven by whim and curiosity more than by itinerary and predetermined schedule.

But numbers won’t tell you how it felt to drive 566 miles to Bend, Oregon after watching the annular eclipse with a group of locals on the town green in Elko, Nevada.  They can’t convey my gratitude for the unexpected kindness I received during the Blue Car’s three days at the mechanic to have its transmission seal changed in Jackson, Wyoming. Or the awe I felt standing at an overlook at Badlands, the first National Park of my trip, feeling very small and very alive.

Numbers are neat. They lend the illusion of order, as if experiences can be stacked into rows and sorted alphabetically. But good journeys—transformational ones—refuse to be quantified. The best moments spill outside the margins and confined boxes, resisting the tidy logic of spreadsheets.

What made my road trip unforgettable weren’t the miles on the odometer or the Blue Car’s unexpectedly good fuel consumption. It was experiences. It was the stories made when the weather turned suddenly bad. When a stranger stopped to talk about the Blue Car and offered a childhood memory. When I laughed deeply with a fellow sunrise junkie at the rim of the Grand Canyon at 4:30am in the fierce wind and freezing cold as we shared his thermos of coffee. My road trip was unforgettable because of what I carried with me. And what I left behind.

For every data point in my sketchbook, entered into that spreadsheet, there are a host of numbers that reveal unexpected moments and truths. Things I never meant to measure. Like how many times I trusted a stranger, how many times I surprised myself, and how many times I said yes. And most of all, how many times I felt comfortable asking, What do I want to do today?

I know so much more about myself now than I did then. Every mile traveled in our lives, every day spent in quiet or big moments, adds layers of understanding, revelations, and yes, more questions.  And maybe that’s the real purpose of a long road trip or any journey: to discover what we can’t count or quantify.  

As I prepare for my upcoming European road trip and look at this fresh sketchbook, I can see that tracking numbers in 2023 was never really about fuel or mileage. It was about tracking myself—assuring myself I would stay on course and be okay, no matter what the trip brought my way.

And in February, I’ll get behind the wheel of the Blue Car in Le Havre, and my careful data collection will steady me again as I continue to step into a life larger than I ever imagined. It’s my way of understanding where I am, moment by moment, in a life that is suddenly, inexplicably, and joyfully wide open with possibility.

Because the truth is, the numbers only tell you where I went.

The experiences tell you what I thought about it all and who I am becoming.

That’s where this story really begins.

And where we’re headed next week.