PORT ANGELES –– In the summer of 1973, Alan Dawson stuck out his thumb to get across America.
Forty summers later, he repeated the trip, just in a bit more comfort.
“Now I’m a little older, I like things like beds and hot water every night,” the Port Angeles retiree said.
“And I had the car, I had a couple bucks. It made it a lot easier.
“The first time was back in the hippie days, so it was a little easier to hitch a ride,” he said.
He took off in his Hyundai on the last day in June and returned earlier this month.
Some places, the 67-year-old Dawson said, had not changed from his first pass.
“Bowman, N.D.: I got there, and it looked just like I remembered it looking 40 years ago,” Dawson said. “The thing is, I think it looked kind of crappy then, too.”
He recognized the old churches, main streets and manicured old houses of towns in the east, he said.
“I did remember seeing some of those old cemeteries on the main drags that you see back east,” he said. “Particularly like in West Virginia or Pennsylvania — that area.”
Others, particularly in the southwest, were completely different.
Retired from a career of working a number of jobs in copper mines, hotels and a whole variety of industries, Dawson wanted to hit all 50 states on this trek in his car.
“But I couldn’t drive to all of them, obviously,” he said.
In the early spring, he flew to Hawaii. Later, he took a cruise to Alaska.
“It would have been tough to hitchhike out there,” he said.
He also had the assistance of technology this time, using his GPS to find the nearest hotels and restaurants.
Dawson started driving in June because his first destination was Glacier National Park, the road to which does not open until summer.
From there, he took a winding route along back roads south into Wyoming and Nebraska before turning north through Missouri on to Wisconsin and his home state of Michigan.
“There’s a lot of open space in the middle where there aren’t too many people — or hotels or gas stations or restaurants or anything else,” he said.
Using his trusty old atlas, he made another back-and-forth up and down the country, winding his way up to the northeast corner of the country, where he made a time-eating mistake trying to get from Vermont to New Hampshire.
“You miss one turn, you’re pretty much doomed in that country,” he said. “There aren’t many options to get across.”
Back down south along the eastern seaboard, he went to Florida before tracing the southern states back to the west.
“I do love it in the west,” he said. “There’s some absolutely beautiful towns in Colorado.
“There’s also some really nasty, really ugly little towns down in Nevada and southern California.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Joe Smillie can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or at jsmillie@peninsuladailynews.com.
