By motor to the Golden Gate

A New York banker answered for me: “Not at all! The best thing is to put them in another machine directly behind, with a good mechanic. Then if you break down the man in the rea...

We had intended making Syracuse our first night’s stopping-place. It can easily be done, but as we were so late starting—it was nearly half-past one—we decided upon Albany inste...

Only two hundred miles from home and a breakdown! We had left Albany early in the morning and were running happily along over a road as smooth as a billiard table. Everything we...

Erie is a nice, homelike little city, full of business; and our hotel, the Lawrence, very good. There was an irate man at the desk this morning. “Say, what kind of a hotel do yo...

Never in the world did people have so much luggage with nowhere to put it and nothing in it when it is put! Each black piece is bursting! Yet everything we have with us is the w...

Sometimes we take luncheon with us and sometimes we don’t. If we do, we see nice, clean-looking places on the road, such as the Parmly at Plainsville between Erie and Cleveland...

We arrived yesterday at “America’s most perfect hotel.” We are still a little overawed. So far we have only been in hotels that have prided themselves on being the “best hotel i...

The disappointing and unsatisfactory thing about a motor trip is that unless you have unlimited time, which few people ever seem to have, you stop too short a while in each plac...

If E. M. were put in charge of the commissary department we would be given hardtack and water—his suggestions as to food never go any further. I, on the other hand, feel impelle...

Thirty-six miles out of Chicago we met the Lincoln Highway and from the first found it a disappointment. As the most important, advertised and lauded road in our country, its fi...

Twenty-four hours in a town like this and we feel as though we knew it and the people intimately. In many ways it suggests a toy-land town. Its streets are so straight and evenl...

We know now what is the matter! They think we are quitters! They are so filled with a sense of shame for us that we are beginning to feel it ourselves. In spite of our original...

The morning looked gray but having gone easily enough the day before with chains on, we no longer worried about a little rain. Nevertheless, we left our beautiful rooms at the B...

Somewhere we read a sign “Cedar Rapids suits me. It will suit you.” Of course after those last six hours of mud-wallowing agony C-e-d-a-r R-a-p-i-d-s simply spelled Heaven. But...

Just as the good roads turned into mud slides in a few minutes, a few hours of sun and wind transformed them into good ones again. After only two days’ delay we went back over t...

Where, Oh, where is the West that Easterners dream of—the West of Bret Harte’s stories, the West depicted in the moving pictures? Are the scenes no longer to be found except in...

North Platte might really be called “City of Ishmael.” For no reason that is discoverable except its mere existence, every man’s tongue seems to be against it. Time and time aga...

Mountains, plains, squatters’ shanties, replicas of foreign palaces, cowboys, Indians, ranchers, New Yorkers, Londoners. The free open-air life and altitude of the plains, the s...

We might have been taking an unconscious part in some vast moving picture production, or, more easily still, if we overlooked the fact of our own motor car, we could have suppos...

With straight black Indian hair piled high under a lace mantilla, with necklaces of gold and silver and coral and turquoise as big as hens’ eggs, with her modern American dress...

Imagine people living all their lives in Cairo never having seen the Pyramids. Imagine anyone living in Italy never having been to Pompeii. Yet we, ourselves, to whom the antiqu...

The best commentary on the road between Santa Fé and Albuquerque is that it took us less than three hours to make the sixty-six miles, whereas the seventy-three from Las Vegas t...

Personally I felt a sort of half-shiver. Sleep out in this land he had been telling us about! Sleep out in the wildest, loneliest country in the world, surrounded by the very Re...

What has this land lived through? What sorrows have so terribly wasted, what cataclysms rent it, what courage exalted it! Stupendous in its desolation, sublime in its awfulness,...

Laboriously E. M. wrote her name as she herself pronounced it, “Loas Ang-hell-less.” With the piece of paper before me I can say it glibly enough, but in coming upon it unprepar...

Light-hearted, happy, basking in the sunshine, her eyes not dreamily gazing into the past, nor avariciously peering into the future, but dancing with the joy of today—such is Ca...

An explosion shook the town, then came the fire engines. Everybody ran and of course we ran too. We saw a big, Colonial house in a blaze, then a second explosion! And a thick bl...

Just as it is often for their little tricks or failings that we love people best, so it is with San Francisco. You may find her beautiful as she rises tier on tier on her many h...

The Fair will be over when this account is published, but it was so dominant a part of San Francisco at the time we—and all the thousands of others—were there I haven’t the hear...

Of course you can’t see the Fair in a day, or two days, or three. And if you stay long in San Francisco, you won’t want to leave at all. Up and down and around the hills, you co...

For the benefit of those who are planning such a trip and in answer to the many questions that have been asked us since our return, we have compiled the following pages:

We had far too many! They were a perfect nuisance! Yet each traveler needs a heavy coat, a thin coat or sweater, a duster and a rug or two, and there is a huge bundle already. T...

This was the original query that we started out to answer, and second “How long did it take you?” is the question that has been asked us more often than any other.