Text by Lizzie Wade & Photos by Nick Russell
Text by Lizzie Wade & photos by Nick Russell 26 Illustration: Sandbox Studio symmetry | volume 7 issue 3 june 2010 In the summer of 1928, the young Ernest O. Lawrence set out across America in a Flying Cloud coupe to begin his new life at the University of California, Berkeley. Eighty-one years later, a writer and a photographer took a road trip to visit the legacy of this accelerator-physics pioneer: American Big Science. 27 Every good cross-country road trip needs a theme. Sure, you can drive across the United States in three days flat, heading in a straight line on impersonal interstates and stopping at the occasional Waffle House for sustenance. But that doesn’t do justice to the great American tradition of the road trip, heading from sea to shining sea with the windows down and the radio on. From On the Road to Easy Rider, we’ve learned that the destination isn’t the point—it’s how you get there that counts. So when my boyfriend Nick Russell and I decided to drive from New York City to Los Angeles last summer, we weighed various options for our theme: The always-classic National Parks? The quirkier tour of Elvis museums? Major cities? Small towns? Desert, mountains, prairie? Uninspired, we threw out ideas for stops along the way. Marfa, Texas— good art, family friends, and UFO lights in the desert. Pueblo, Colorado—the Rocky Mountains, a friend’s parents, and Casa Bonita, a cross between a Mexican restaurant and Disneyland. Petersburg, Kentucky—the Creation Museum, devoted to disproving evolution, which we ultimately decided was not for us.
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