Over the last two weeks or so, I’ve been celebrating the five year anniversary of the trip that inspired Lincoln Highway 101. As I’m sure you may have guessed, this will be the last of those posts—against (some, many, ?) odds, we made it back home.

Ivelis and I arrived home safely but quite spent at our house in Bryn Mawr on May 31, 2014, at roughly 3:40 pm. We had traveled approximately 6,314 miles, and we had (amazingly) made it in our 29 and a half-year-old car. I felt like both we and Lauren should have received some kind of medal!

The three of us had been on the road for a total of 15 days. One day was spent “staging” to Times Square, New York City, eight traveling from Times Square to Lincoln Park, San Francisco on the Lincoln Highway, and six returning home (actually five and a half because we stopped for significant amounts of time at those two amazing museums on our second to last day out). I have to give credit to the weather in mid to late May of 2014—for the most part, it was near perfect. So many of our photos of this trip include beautiful blue skies.

For all of my worries and concerns about our ability to successfully complete this trip in this car, we ended up having only two major issues—the passenger door and the stalls. For the final eight days of our journey, I remained quite concerned that the passenger door would disintegrate even further than it had in Ely, Nevada. However, Ivelis and I were able to use both the manual door lock and the inside door handle all the way back home. Despite these problems, I’m very glad that we took this excursion in Lauren—I think that this choice of vehicle made the experience more special.

If you are interested, all the posts are here.