Impromptu Road Trip Leads to a New Appreciation of the Land
When he heard the news of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington last week, Robert Mansfield was in Atlanta with a group of fellow Kia Motors America employees and two analysts from J.D. Power & Associates.
The resulting halt of air traffic stranded the group, as it stranded tens of thousands of other business and vacation travelers.
As most of his team opted to keep trying to find a flight home, Mansfield instead joined thousands of others who decided to get in a car and head for the still-open road.
The impetus for the trip was a globe-shaking tragedy, and Mansfield doesn’t make light of that.
But the 34-year-old executive calls the cross-country drive a “great experience” that gave him a chance to get acquainted with the land of his birth--a land he often travels over but had never driven through.
“The farthest I’d ever been in a car before this was a trip to Iowa when I was a kid,” said Mansfield, who heads the performance improvement unit at Kia Motors America, a subsidiary of the South Korean auto maker.
“It really opened my eyes. The guy I was with was real knowledgeable about American history, and every time we got to a place like Little Rock [Ark.] or Birmingham [Ala.], he’d talk about its historic background in the civil rights movement.”
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Mansfield said the trip started when he and J.D. Power analyst Glen Pincus “determined to control our own destiny and drive home.”
They rounded up an Optima, Kia’s new mid-size sedan, from the company’s Atlanta district office and set out for Los Angeles at 6 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday. They arrived in Los Angeles at 8:30 p.m. the next day, completing the 2,275-mile drive in 41.5 hours--including an eight-hour timeout to catch a night’s sleep in Amarillo, Texas.
Along the way, Mansfield said, he and Pincus never saw any of the outrageously escalated gasoline prices that briefly appeared in the Midwest the day after the terrorist attacks.
They counted 15 Wal-Mart stores visible from the highways--and spent $116.21 at one of them for a couple of changes of clothing--and found that adrenaline pumping through their veins was great for keeping them awake. The adrenaline, Mansfield said, flowed as they continually dodged commercial big-rig trucks weaving in and out of traffic at 80 mph as they apparently rushed to deliver cargo that could no longer be carried in the air.
After returning, Mansfield jotted down the highlights of his trip in an e-mail he sent to co-workers.
“Just in case you ever want to make the drive yourself, I thought it would be interesting to share some of the trip’s highlights with you,” he wrote, appending a list:
* Vehicle: 2001 Kia Optima SE, four-cylinder automatic, with starting odometer reading of 8,846 miles.
* Route: Interstate 20 from Atlanta to Birmingham; U.S. 78 to Memphis, Tenn.; I-40 and I-15 to Rancho Cucamonga; I-10 to Los Angeles International Airport.
* Total driving time (including food and gas stops): 33.5 hours.
* Average speed (not including sleep time): 67.9 mph.
* Average speed (including sleep time): 54.8 mph.
* Average fuel consumption: 29.17 miles per gallon.
* Total fuel cost: $134.10.
* Most expensive gasoline: $1.69 per gallon in Kingman, Ariz.
* Food consumed: 2 liters of Mountain Dew, 1 liter of Dr Pepper, one large Coke, two Arby’s roast beef sandwiches, one large order of French fries, one Burger King hamburger, five chicken nuggets, one ham-and-cheese sandwich from a gas station, one bag of Munchos.
* Favorite radio station: National Public Radio, although the reggae station in Clarksville, Ark., was a close second.
* Favorite road sign: “Toad Suck Park This Exit” (in Arkansas).
* Only sightseeing stop: Elvis Presley’s birthplace, Tupelo, Miss.
* Favorite acquaintance made: the cowboy from Nevada in the 1970s-era wood-grain-sided station wagon who got gas at the same stations and same time as Mansfield and Pincus in Hinton, Okla., and Santa Rosa and Grants, N.M.
* State with the most road construction: Arkansas (border to border).
* Most abandoned make of car seen on the side of the road: Chevrolet, followed by Chrysler.
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“What really struck me about the trip,” Mansfield said Monday, “is that there is so much to see in the United States that people take for granted. Things you read about in books and learn about in school that you don’t think about until you drive through and see that they are real. I’d like to take a couple weeks’ vacation to drive around and see more.”
Times staff writer John O’Dell covers autos for Highway 1 and the Business section. He can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.
