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Marc Hernandez has a 2,500-mile ride to school. Good thing he likes driving long distances.
Hernandez is from Southlake, Texas. A second-year student, he road trips to the University of Maine every August and back to his hometown, near Dallas and Fort Worth, every May.
“It really clears the mind,” he says, driving his Honda Civic to Old Town from his Orono apartment. The route he’s taking this evening is a 12-mile loop – a blip on the odometer compared to his trek from the Pine Tree State to the Lone Star State.
He spends three days on the journey; more than 30 hours on a road winding through 14 states. He recites them in order, in both directions, from memory.
The end of this semester will mark Hernandez’s sixth trip. He calls it therapeutic. He loves music, and his car speakers are one of his favorite outlets for listening. He’s always accompanied by a family member – his father, Roland, drove with him the past four times.
“Just my dad and I, two guys, for three days, doing nothing but driving – got no place to be except for the hotel that night,” Hernandez says.
Hernandez and his father plan the route and the nightly stops, splitting it into thirds. Detours along the way are impromptu – Hernandez recalls Graceland, the home-slash-museum of Elvis Presley, as a fun stop.
“My dad has an atlas,” Hernandez says, motioning behind the passenger seat. “He just busts it out and is like, ‘Let’s go this way.’” Hernandez can’t decipher routes on a map – he uses his iPhone as a GPS.
“It’s really cool seeing how regions change, how from state to state, the people change,” he says. “One second you’ll be in Nashville, and one second you’ll be in back-town Virginia, where you’re in the hills and you get out and there are people speaking a language that you don’t know if it’s English or not.”
Many Mainers attend their state university and endure no more than a few hours of anticipation during their first drive to UMaine. Hernandez had a three-day lead-up.
“I tried not to think about it, because I didn’t want to freak myself out,” he says. “I didn’t want to think about how alone I was going to be until I met some friends.”
Hernandez calls coming to college in Orono a “legacy” – his father was born in Cuba, moved to Maine in his early teenage years and eventually attended– UMaine.
It’s a legacy that demands a car.
“In Maine, where I’m kind of disconnected from everything, I felt it necessary to be around my car,” Hernandez said. “I knew I’d want to go to Boston, I’d want to go to Portland, I’d want to rely on myself to get groceries.” The requisite college carload of supplies and dorm room decor wouldn’t have translated well to a trip by flight; Hernandez calls driving to school “a practicality.”
Simply getting from point A to point B, driving primarily on highways, can dull the experience – Hernandez has trouble staying awake at the wheel after two or three hours – but reflection tends to sweeten the experience.
He considers himself a good driver. He’s gotten one speeding ticket. Tonight, on his drive through Old Town, he keeps both his hands on the wheel and leans forward, alert. He keeps the music from his iPod at a reasonable volume.
He talks about his most memorable trip – the first one, the one where his car got wrecked.
Hernandez, 18 years old at the time, was in Abingdon, Va., 1,000 miles into the inaugural Texas-to-Maine excursion, accompanied by his 20-year-old brother, Alexys. A miscommunication between the two over whether to enter traffic ended catastrophically.
“A truck came out of nowhere and just nailed us,” Hernandez says. There was $6,500 of damage to his car and the nearest “big town” was two hours away.
“We ended up with all of my stuff going into my dorm just sprawled out right off the highway,” he says. In a stop-and-go trip that took them via train and rental car to New York, Boston and eventually Orono, Hernandez’s possessions were packed and unpacked a handful more times.
“It was a huge load of stress,” Hernandez says. “But a few months later you look back at it and you think, ‘Damn, that was so much fun.’ Because I’ll have stories to tell, like, I jumped in a car, and I was exhausted and wanted to fall asleep right then, and we still had to drive six hours. And then we ended up in New York, having a blast.”
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Hernandez’s Texas license plate can’t boast Orono’s furthest pilgrimage – those rights belong to the Alaska plates of Chantrelle Cousins and Cari Gill.
Cousins drove from Maine to her native Homer, Alaska with her boyfriend Mike in the summer of 2007. They covered 18,000 miles round-trip in her new Subaru Outback, purchased in accordance with the expedition. One dog, Dasie, a malamute golden retriever, rode with them for the first leg, and another, Jada, an American bulldog-husky mix joined them for the ride back.
The trip took Chantrelle and Mike through 26 states with plenty of sightseeing detours. Her longest shift behind the wheel without changing passed the drive with an audio book.
“We’ve done it . jeez, I can’t even count it on my hand,” Cousins said of the trip from Maine to Alaska; she has family in both states. Without constraints like time and money, Cousins would opt to drive to and from school every time, she said.
“I prefer to see things rather than fly over them,” she said. She loves traveling and echoes T.S. Elliot’s idea that it is the journey, not the destination that matters.
Second-year student Cari Gill flew to UMaine her first year, but road tripped to Orono last summer. She purchased a 2005 Volkswagen Jetta in Everett, Wash., fearing her truck would not last the trip from her hometown of Anchorage, Alaska. A UMaine soccer player, Gill needed to arrive in Orono early for preseason.
“I started planning it out a month in advance. My dad was like, ‘What are you doing? Just get an old map and we’ll go wherever the road takes us,’” Gill said. She threw away her Google Maps printouts after the first day of their 3,300-mile voyage. They visited the site of Custer’s Last Stand, Mt. Rushmore and Gettysburg.
“I’ve always loved driving,” she said. She and her father took turns, driving three to four hours each. “You sit in a car long enough with the same person, you get to know them.”
“We were pretty leisurely about our time,” she said. They drove four-and-a-half days. One of her favorite memories is discovering in North Dakota that antelope exist in the U.S.
“I think it was one of those lifetime experiences that you wouldn’t give up for anything,” she said of the trip.
Her license plate is a talking point in Maine.
“You’re just sitting in your car and you see people walking by going, ‘Look, that girl’s from Alaska!’” An acquaintance of Gill’s at an Old Town diner knows her only as “Alaska.”
Gill is unsure when she’ll drive the full trip to Alaska, guessing next summer or after college.
