After years of long-distance driving, even I can’t deny the incredible lure of the wind in your hair and miles stretching before you. There’s nothing like the tally of an odometer or the weight of a fully-packed boot to give you a freedom-flooded open-road high. It’s one of life’s little pleasures, a leftover instinct our pioneering forefathers genetically passed onto us that makes us want to roll down our windows and head west, or in my case, north.

With a week of spring break and a consequently blissfully unoccupied calendar, my mates and I just couldn’t let the whole of the week toil away in front of a television screen or be given over completely to late-afternoon lie-ins, so we did what any adventurous and resourceful soon to be college grads would do: we embarked on a road trip. All it took was a few hours packing and a single AAA map to fill our proverbial sails and lead us into the great unknown of the pacific northwest. The plan? Drive. Preferably as far as possible and as fast as can legally be allowed.

Stop one: Morro bay. Were there sealions? No. Was it worth it? Yes.

Stop two: Berkeley. Delicious late-night Thai noodles and a midnight hike up a mountain for a breathtaking view of the bay area.

Stop three: San Francisco. Touring around Chinatown, North Beach, Fisherman’s Warf, and Union Square.

Stop four: More San Francisco. We pass the day hanging around the beautiful and foggy Golden Gate Park and spend the evening celebrating St. Patrick’s day by bar hopping all over the Haight, Mission, and Castro areas. An incredible Italian meal with excellent wine ensues.

Stop five: Portland. For dinner.

Stop six: Seattle. We are fed lots of food, allowed to sleep as late as we like, and spend the rest of our hours perusing Pike’s Place, drinking original Starbuck’s, losing hours inside the Elliott Bay Book Co., and finally seeing Watchmen.

Stop seven: Home.

Berkeley made me question my choices in university, but only for the few brief moments that transported me to another place entirely: the spanning and sparkling vistas of the city at night, the hours-long multi-course French breakfast, the fog rolling off the hills each morning, and the gaudy post-teen fads of trashy-cum-hipster neighbourhood pockets. A few engaging conversations about maths, SETI, and zombie movies later, I filled myself with mango-ginger smoothie from a Brazilian shack and said goodbye to a decidedly enviable but certainly egotistical region of the north bay. I had incredible amounts of fun in proportions round enough to make us stay an extra day.

San Francisco is pretentious but in a way well-deserved. Ambling the streets of Chinatown and Little Italy make you forget you’re in the city at all, and Golden Gate Park one-ups both Hyde and Central Park’s over-hyped designs with its Japanese tea garden and bath houses and Academy of Sciences. The many districts award you a freedom to wander and explore, and the many San Franciscans are all too happy to strike up the kind of conversations usually reserved for close friends and philosophical discussion classes. Yet in many ways the pastels of the bay area tickled but didn’t sell me, and while San Francisco was an adventure well worth having and a city I plan to holiday in again, it’s a touch too self conscious for me to seriously rally for.

Seattle on the other hand was an unexpected pleasure. A thick-blooded southerner who for all intents and purposes grew up in a swamp, I thought the damp chill of a city so far north would get the better of me in a few days time. I hadn’t expected the lush green and visceral soundscapes to appeal to my better natures, or the downtown’s posh design yet colloquial clientele to forage an affinity. Instead Seattle took me by complete surprise and charmed me into fandom. Our last day in Washington was the highlight of the trip for me, where I finally grasped the scope of the city, saw the Eastern side’s rolling streets, and spent more time in parks and bookshops than I could hope for. The glassblowing company could keep me occupied for days, and the rapidly shifting weather would never leave me bored. I’ll be the first to admit I was sad to leave Seattle behind with such rapidity.

I took a class in Australian national cinema while at UQ, and by far the most interesting lecture covered the road movie. Made infamous by aficionados like Quentin Tarantino, Australians know how to film a car chase and film it right (please direct all counter-arguments here). In American road movies, the goal is to cross a finish line of sorts; if only our two outlaws can make it to the state line or the border to Mexico, where freedom awaits, or more often, impending death by machine gun. On the road, anything goes. In Australian road movies, the characters are doomed from the get go, because the land down under is, after all, nothing but an oversized island free of borders and thus also escape. But the Australians don’t need escape, for they indulge in the expression of life through the climb of the speedometer and the chase for the sake of chase more than our metal-pedal-pounders ever do. On the other side of the world we don’t just hitch up and ride, but instead we drive with a purpose, maybe because we know there’s an end. One day we know we’ll either make it home or die trying, and we know terminal velocity can only be achieved in perfect driving zen, and we know the road home is always far longer, far emptier, but far more important than the one with the most mile markers and the highest speed limits. And that’s why we drive. That’s why I drive.