Galveston, Texas, to Covington, Georgia
As the first light of dawn softened the horizon, we emerged from the cabin, the air thick with the last whispers of night. It was face washings, teeth brushing, and very much a zombie-like air as we fell into the van for one last push—our longest of the trip. Our opening volley 28 days ago was a sprint from Covington to Columbia, Missouri. A respectable 721 miles. This slingshot home would be 869 miles from door to door. One day, one shot out of a cannon. Diem and I prepared snacks, sandwiches, and iced beverages to keep our stops to only gas stations.
The van, our companion across countless miles, stood waiting, its doors yawning open as if to swallow the final leg of our journey. At 7 a.m., we pulled onto the road, the wheels rolling forward with a quiet inevitability, carrying us away from the salt-stained winds of Galveston and into the vast, shifting landscape of the road home.
The road unfurled before us, a final thread in the long weave of our journey. As we left Galveston, the sun rose behind us, spilling golden light over the coastal marshes, casting long shadows on the road. The van hummed with the kind of silence that had grown familiar—less from exhaustion and more from the quiet weight of transition. A journey this long does something to people. It reshapes the edges of who we are, smooths some, and sharpens others. The van, once a place of shared excitement, had become a space of quiet reflection, each of us lost in our corners of its meaning.
Part of our purpose had been to give Diem, Jennie, and Lisa, who had only been in the U.S. for just over a year, a crash course in what it means to be American. Its monuments, its cultural significance, its national parks, and wide open spaces. The heartbeat and feeling of America. We have our differences, Americans I mean, so many polarizing ideologies these days, it feels almost un-American in some ways. It is America’s fundamental truth that is its greatest asset. It’s diversity in people. Make no mistake, it is still a place where immigrants can come from less desirable positions, work hard, and change their paradigms. Change their family’s paradigm of poverty and struggle. And this makes it a truly amazing place.
Upon reflection now, I could not have known the significance this trip had for Maggie and me as well. Ninety percent of the places we visited I had never seen before. I knew that would be the case, but to put my tires to the road and drive every mile from here and back again changed what America meant to me. I feel more in touch with the land and its place in the expanse of us. I’m more compelled to participate in programs to protect our beautiful spaces. More respectful of nature and more cognizant of the challenges faced by our major cities and delicate wilderness as we work to balance progress and preservation. It had fundamentally shifted the focus on what America would be to me.
The highway stretched out before us, endless yet ever-changing. The children in the backseat spoke in hushed tones before settling into their rhythms, their movements ebbing and flowing like the tides we had left behind. The hum of the tires became something steady, something meditative, each passing mile a breath in, a breath out. The world beyond the windshield flickered by in shades of green and gold, the marshlands melting into open fields, then thickening into the wooded stretches of East Texas.
There was a strange weight to this final day. The anticipation of home pulled at us, but so did the quiet sorrow of an ending. It was the same feeling that lingers in the last moments of a long evening with friends when laughter slows and silence carries more meaning than words. We had been moving for so long, wrapped in the singular purpose of travel, that stopping felt foreign. The road had been our measure of time, our constant tether to something just out of reach. And now, it was unraveling beneath us.
As the sun lifted higher, burning through the morning haze, I watched the world outside and let my mind settle into the space between thoughts. There was something comforting about how the landscape shifted without effort, how each place existed entirely in its moment before yielding to the next. A field does not resist becoming a forest. A river does not mourn where it has been. Movement is the only constant, and in its quiet way, it asks nothing of us except to move with it.
Crossing into Louisiana, the landscape thickened, the air taking on the dense weight of the familiar. The air was thicker, the trees more knotted and knowing, the rivers swollen with stories they weren’t in a hurry to tell. We were moving toward something known, yet everything felt different. That was the paradox of return—you arrive at the same place but are not the same person. The road had reshaped us in ways too subtle to name. The long, quiet mornings. The heat pressed against the van’s windows. The unfamiliar places that became momentary homes. Each experience had left something behind, like footprints in wet sand, fading but never truly gone.
I thought about what it meant to leave a place, to depart truly. Every road trip ends the same way—with a return—but the person who left is never quite the same as the one who comes back. Experience carves its mark, subtle but undeniable, like the slow work of water over stone. This journey had changed us, but how exactly remained just beyond words. Perhaps that was the point. Some things aren’t meant to be held too tightly. Some things are meant to settle, to find their own way to the surface in time.
The afternoon unfolded in the slow crawl of highway miles, the road pulling us eastward, closer to home, yet still tethered to the vastness of the trip behind us. Heavy with the weight of both exhaustion and reflection, the van hummed steadily over the pavement. Lafayette had given us a meal—gas station ribs, boudin, cracklins, gater fritters, and crawfish cakes eaten between the clutter of road snacks and water bottles. Gas station food in Louisianna is some of the best eating within 200 miles of the Mississippi River.
After LaFayette, the landscape shifted, stretching out before us in vast, green marshes and tangled cypresses, the air thick with humidity. Once vast and unobstructed over Texas, the sky now pressed lower, cloud banks rolling over the horizon. The bridges grew taller, spanning muddy waters, industrial complexes rising in skeletal frames beyond the trees. The heart of the South, pulsing in refineries and rusted river barges. It was a land that held history in its bones, where time felt less linear, more like an ever-present cycle of flood and rebuild, loss and renewal.
Silence hung in the van. Not the forced quiet of previous days, when we were too drained from each other’s company to speak, but something different—a shared awareness that we were nearing the end. The roads leading toward New Orleans carried a kind of inevitability, like the slow turn of a page in a book too gripping to put down but too close to its final chapter to ignore. We had seen and done so much, yet there was still the road ahead, the last stretch that would lead us home.
The weight of the journey was no longer a burden but a presence, something that settled over us like the humid Louisiana air. Each mile felt like a moment of reckoning, a quiet acknowledgment that whatever had been left unresolved before this trip, whatever had driven us out onto the road in the first place, was still waiting at the other end. But for now, we drove, the van rolling ever forward, the Mississippi River drawing near, marking yet another threshold between what was and what would be.
The drive stretched into the afternoon, the road carving its way through the endless green and waterlogged earth of southern Louisiana. The Atchafalaya Basin unfolded around us, an ancient, breathing thing—swamp cypress rising like forgotten sentinels, their knees breaking the still water’s surface, remnants of a world that thrived long before pavement and steel bridges cut across its heart. The heat pressed in heavy, thick with the scent of brackish water and distant rain, but the sky above remained an expanse of uninterrupted blue.
Traffic thickened as we approached New Orleans, the hum of eighteen-wheelers mixing with the low, sluggish churn of the river beneath us. The weight of the journey settled in—a quiet recognition that the road, long and winding, was beginning its last great arc. The Mississippi loomed ahead, its waters moving with the kind of inevitability that mirrored our return home.
Lunch sat heavy in our stomachs, the taste of gas station boudin and smoky ribs still clinging to our tongues. These were the flavors of the South, unpretentious and rich, the kind of meal that reminded you of where you were even before you glanced at the road signs.
Beyond New Orleans, the miles bled together, the highway rhythm lulling the van into silence once more. The city fell behind, swallowed by the thick pines and swamps of eastern Louisiana, where the land softened as if preparing for the weight of memory to settle in before crossing into Mississippi.
The road unfurled ahead in a shimmering mirage, stretching eastward through Louisiana and into Mississippi. The world outside the van was a blur of cypress swamps, steel bridges, and the occasional roadside relic from another time. The remnants of the journey lay scattered among a month’s detritus, empty water bottles, and the ghostly echoes of conversations long since abandoned.
Crossing into Mississippi, the air inside the van remained thick with unspoken thoughts, the weight of nearing home pressing down on each of us in different ways. The enormity of what we had seen and done lingered in the gaps between words, a presence more tangible than the passing miles. The journey had carved itself into us, imprinting lessons we wouldn’t fully understand until much later when the van was parked for good, and the road was nothing but a memory.
The road unspooled before us, an endless ribbon of asphalt guiding us back toward the familiar. The deepening day softened the edges of exhaustion, smoothing the jagged wear of the long journey. Alabama welcomed us with a quiet nod, the land itself infused with the echoes of my earliest memories, a reminder that home was just over the horizon.
Crossing into Georgia, the weight of home became tangible. The trees were the right shade of green, the humidity carried a scent I recognized without thinking. The road signs held names I had seen a thousand times, now infused with a meaning that had subtly shifted in my absence. Travel does that—it rearranges the furniture of the mind, making the familiar look just different enough to feel new. The way out is the way in. You only need to rearrange your thoughts to find the way.
As the miles dwindled, the past month compressed into something dreamlike. The deserts of the West, the red rocks and towering trees, the distant oceans and empty roads—all of it existed now in the same place as childhood memories and old songs heard in passing. The road had given us a thousand versions of ourselves, each moment a new beginning and a quiet farewell.
The final stretch home was bathed in the inky darkness of night. The sun had long expired below the horizon. There was no grand arrival, no final revelation—just the slow pull of familiar streets, the last turn into the driveway, the engine cutting off with a sigh. As we pulled into the driveway, the journey’s vastness collapsed into the dense singularity of home. The tires stilled. The doors opened. The night air settled around us like a quiet exhale. I sat behind the wheel for a moment, not turning the van off. I just sat there, taking it all in. A part of me wanted to cling to the movement, to keep driving, and to keep pushing forward into the unknown. But another part understood that stopping was just as necessary as moving.
The road had taken us far and shown us the world’s expanse, the weight of silence, the gravity of conversation, and the depth of connection forged through shared experience. And now, as the van doors opened for the last time, I knew that this was both an end and a beginning. The journey was over, but it had also left its mark—a quiet imprint on the soul, a shifting of perspective, a whisper of something vast and ungraspable, always just beyond the horizon.
Stepping out, the air smelled of pine and damp earth, the same as it always had. Yet, beneath that sameness was something new, something quiet and unspoken. The journey was over, but the movement did not end. The road had not left us behind—it had simply continued, waiting for us to find it again. There’s always a new road to explore, a new town to call a temporary home, which will always remain, beneath an endless sky.
Click here for the National Park Services to explore some of the parks and monuments we’ve explored and more.
