Overlanders (Drive Day 233: Feb 17th, 2004)
It is in this stretch of between-ness that we discover overland tours. When you encounter foreign travelers here it is because they are en route to someplace more dramatic: the Peninsula Valdez or Tierra del Fuego.
Adventurous types hitch rides in converted military vehicles and beefed up, outback-style busses that barrel over viciously gravel roads in the dead of night. And it isn’t only young people.
At Peninsula Valdez we meet a retired Nebraskan and her German husband who are driving their Armageddon-ready, converted Mercedes WWII communications vehicle through every country on every continent. Our 1968 Avion seems delicate and fragile by comparison, especially when we know that this drive is coming to an end. We will have to sell our little house-on-wheels to fund our return trip.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
"TeresaBruceBooks" 
February 19, 2018 at 11:51 AM
I was reading a pre-publication review of Rutkow, Eric. The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest To Link the Americas. Scribner. Jul. 2018. 416p. ISBN 9781501103902. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781501103926. HISTORY
The longest road in the world, the Pan American Highway barrels down from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. Award-winning Yale historian Rutkow (American Canopy) reconstructs the efforts to build it while considering the long-term consequences for North, Central, and South America. … and thought of you.
LikeLike