Roadtrip Nation

I heard of Roadtrip Nation on the radio while I was sweeping the floor.

Their's is another story of how people 'think outside the box by getting out of their box'. I added them to my list of urban camper types.

Mike Marriner and Nathan Gebhard had no idea what to do with their lives after college graduation so they traveled across the USA in a huge green camper vehicle "to see what else was out there."

They introduce their book, Finding the Open Road: A Guide to Self Construction Rather Than Mass Production by saying:

"You should be a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a consultant, blah, blah, blah.

Everywhere you turn people try to tell you who to be and what to do with your life.

We call that the noise. Block it. Shed it. Leave it for the conformists.

As a generation, we need to get back to focusing on individuality. Self-construction rather than mass production.

Define your own road in life instead of traveling down someone else's. Listen to yourself. Your road is the open road. Find it."

On their roadtrip, they sought out people who had "successfully defined their own paths in life."

Through cold-calling, they managed to meet and hear the stories of 140 people including:

• the chairman of Starbucks
• a lobsterman from Maine
• the director of Saturday Night Live
• the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic
• the first female Supreme Court Justice of the United States
• the head stylist for Madonna
• the scientist who decoded the human genome
• the CEO of National Geographic Ventures

Read more about their project in the Princeton Review.

Technorati tags: urban camping, travel, individuality, discovery