Life's roundabouts: The important lessons you learn when you take a road trip
On the road again
FROM VEGAS MIRAGES to sun-bleached country towns, the road has always promised freedom, and reinvention. But what if its true seductive power lies not in arrival, but in the space between, where identity remains fluid and possibility still feels endless.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the road. It’s a love affair of sorts. Despite the many times I’ve been pulled away from her (I’m a serial offender when it comes to losing my licence), I always come back.
When I turned 16 and became eligible for my Ls, I applied that very day. To my parents’ surprise, it was one of the few exams I studied for – and I passed on my first attempt.
And that was it. What would become a lifelong romance with the road had begun. From the white-knuckle outings as a learner to the road trips as a relatively accomplished motorist, the electricity of freedom at my fingertips has never waned. What pulled me in wasn’t just movement or independence; it was my obsession with the in-between – the suspended state before arrival, before consequence. The person you could be while still in motion. The person you might become before you arrive.
Roadhouses and highway motels exist in that same limbo: places of transit and purgatory; never destinations in themselves but rather perpetual waiting rooms of the road.
They offer you a place to draw out that suspension – to stay liminal a little longer.
Or much longer, if you’re the protagonist in Miranda July’s 2024 novel, All Fours. Her semi-autobiographical narrator sets out on a road trip from Los Angeles, only to stop not far from home and essentially move into a roadside motel. She camps in that in-between space, leaving behind who she was before becoming someone else entirely. The road, acting as both mirror and permission slip, gives her autonomy – a diverted path, a way out of domestic containment, and the time to work out who she wants to be.
That impulse reminds me of the time my friend Daniel and I hired a huge American-style truck and drove from LA to Vegas. On the six-hour drive across the Mojave Desert, I was dressed as a pilot. Not in a sexualised, Halloween-style way – I was professional. We drove through dusty mountains of sand, unfamiliar and captivating terrain, listening to A Horse with No Name. We stopped at roadside eateries for turkey sandwiches and curly fries. It was a seminal trip, and these days it’s lodged somewhere between memory and imagination, too surreal to exist neatly in a single category.
Vegas, of course, is every road metaphor made flesh. You can be whoever you want to be there. You can get married in a blink, drinks are free, Elvis is alive. There’s a network of internal highways – travelators between casinos – so you never have to confront the outside world. The casino lights mimic daylight; some venues have gone so far as to paint frescoes of the sky. Time dissolves. Money turns abstract. Vegas is a roadside playground for adults, a place seemingly exempt from the usual laws of time and consequence. Like all great stops on the American road, it promises transformation without responsibility. With its warped sense of time and choreographed reality, it feels closer to The Truman Show: a perpetual state of make-believe.
On approach, the city rises from the desert like a mirage, a lit-up fairground suspended in arid nothingness, an illusion you can drive right into. At first, it’s intoxicating, like that first hit of open road. But the road has always been a trickster.
In the cold light of day, the Vegas strip reveals itself as tired, sun-bleached and finite.
And, as Newton reminded us, what goes up must come down. After three days of excess – copious drinking, haemorrhaging funds – we were ready to retreat to ‘quiet’ Pasadena and remember who we were.
That tension between escape and return is embedded in every great road story. Springsteen’s State Trooper captures it perfectly. The stripped-back repetition of the acoustic guitar mimics the road itself, the broken white line ticking by – an infinite stretch into the abyss. The road as salvation, as an escape, highlights one of America’s greatest gaslightings: “The land of the free” feels hollow in this song, the more so today than when it was released in 1982.
The highway calls here in Australia, too. More rugged, less forgiving, perhaps, but always there, always beckoning. A good playlist, unplanned stops, a swim in a strange place, a beer in an even stranger one. Passing through small towns where you’re observed as the foreign body you are.
Where Vegas promises everything, including the erasure of whatever you do there, these small Australian towns are the opposite. On a semester break from university, my friend Grace and I drove from Sydney to Hanging Rock in central Victoria to see Leonard Cohen perform. We stopped overnight in a small town, sleeping above the pub. We played pool with locals, drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes.
The town was split cleanly in two by the highway – an arterial vein reminding residents and visitors alike that this was not a destination but simply somewhere to pause en route to someplace else. Unlike Vegas, which can seduce you with excess and illusion, this place was no temptress: rugged and uninviting, it promised nothing. It simply screamed that you didn’t belong. Its residents, you felt, must have veered off the highway long ago, only to find they couldn’t rejoin it. One night in that town was enough. Almost too much.
There are places where the road exposes a duality of identity: those who are passing, and those who are permanent.
And a slip, a stumble could make you the latter.
In the opening credits of The Sopranos, where Tony drives from New York City to New Jersey, the road becomes a changing room: from mob boss to family man. Which role will you step into next? And if you leave the costume on for too long, can you ever really go back?
In Paris, Texas, the road is almost its own character. It’s turned to for answers, but the truth is harsh: the road won’t solve your problems. It will only give you access to them.
But the bad times can pass. Demerit points are restored.
Romance returns. The open road continues to emit its siren song. On the road, the noise drops away. Dreams stretch out. The quiet takes hold.
I’ve always returned to the road for the same reasons.
Nothing behind.
Everything ahead.
A highway of dreams, waiting to be explored.
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