I am one of those people that always gets a little board when I drive. I love to be in the car, but I get a little ansy when I have nothing other than driving to do. Being in the car with friends or family is great because then we can share good conversation, but I don’t always have people in the car with me. I recently took a long road trip across most of the country. It sounds crazy, but I actually drove from Virginia to Oregon and back for a project I was working on. I started looking at license plates to pass the time.
I agreed to do the long road trip for my job. My magazine editor was looking for a writer who would take two months away from the office and write a series of pieces about traveling across country in a car without maps and without a plan of where to stay or where to travel. I took the offer without thinking about my disdain for being in the car alone for hours on end. And let me assure you that this project required long hours alone. Within a hundred miles of leaving our office in Virginia I had begun searching for different license plates. I got out a notepad and began to record each of the different license plates I saw.
My goal became...