Review: Slow Road to San Francisco: Across the USA from Ocean to Ocean

Slow Road to San Francisco: Across the USA from Ocean to Ocean by David Reynolds
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I do not read books on travel experiences very frequently, I like them for being informative on new places, culture and other experiences, including some humorous. A road trip from the east to the west coast spanning 3000 miles looked like it might be an interesting read.

David Reynolds travels to the US from London, UK to make a US east to west coast road trip. He starts from Ocean City, Maryland to keep on Highway 50 till San Francisco, described as a lonely road for much of its length. He has no pre-booked places to stay, strangely does not use GPS (getting lost on and off as a result) and just keeps driving, stopping and looking around where he feels like it. Quite a bit of his travel is through “Trump Country” where the former US President has a strong base. The conversation at each of stops starts with his appeal. An explanation he most likes, is when a man tells him that he supports Trump as he wants him to swagger on the behalf of commoners (who are fighting every day challenges) against intellectual snobs.

While the political discourse dominates a lot of his conversations (quite unnecessarily, and comes across as stale after a point), there are also some good conversations around history, slavery, ethnic Indians & weather. There is too much of detail around what he ate & drank at his stops – indicates meticulous note-taking but is tedious to read. I liked how he was able to strike conversations with strangers quite easily, but the topics could have been more diverse and interesting. Overall, a decent read though should have been a lot crisper.

My rating: 3.5 / 5.

Past the half-way mark in the book, the author mentions that he did a road-trip from the Canada to the Mexico border and wrote about it – just maybe I will look that up.


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