1991 Road Trip Day 1 Morning | Sacramento to Oakland | Driving Across America Without GPS

Fox in Place, Sacramento CA. 1991 — Sacramento, CA, USA — Mar 1991 · Velvia50

ROAD TRIP 1990–1992

May 1991. It was an era before GPS, smartphones, and dashboard navigation systems. Armed with nothing more than a folded Road Atlas, I set out on a road trip from Sacramento to Oakland. This is the story of the first morning of that journey—a tale of the “Rice Ball Strategy,” a vintage Volkswagen Bus, Japanese Ro-Ro ships crossing San Francisco Bay, and the elegant logic behind America’s interstate numbering system.

The sun still hung low in the sky, but it was already a perfect California morning, cloudless and bright. In the parking lot of my Sacramento apartment complex, I started the engine of a car whose roof still glistened with traces of overnight dew.

In the luggage compartment sat an unnecessarily oversized ice chest bought at Price Club—the membership warehouse that would later become Costco. On the passenger seat lay an American staple: a well-worn Road Atlas. It was an era before GPS, dashboard navigation systems, and smartphones. The only thing I could rely on was that paper map, softened by countless openings and refoldings.

There was one other piece of cargo I considered essential. Earlier that morning, I had taken several boxes of Fujifilm Velvia from the refrigerator, and they were still cool to the touch. It wasn’t the sort of film you could easily find once you were out on the road. Slide film was hard enough to track down in major cities; in small towns and rural America, it was even less likely to appear on store shelves. So I packed the dedicated film bag with more rolls than seemed remotely necessary.

A road trip consumes more than gasoline. Inside that film bag lay the remaining frames of landscapes I had yet to encounter, each roll carrying a finite number of chances to preserve whatever waited beyond the horizon.

And so, on that morning, the road trip truly began—a journey westward with little more than a folded map in hand. With no real plan for what lay ahead, the car pointed itself toward the deeper reaches of the American West. Hearing the engine come to life, the apartment manager hurried over to see me off.

“Be careful,” she said. “And have fun.”

The Rice Ball Strategy

The trip had one carefully considered tactic. I called it the Rice Ball Strategy. Loaded into the car was an odd assortment of supplies: bargain-priced Calrose rice, an old Panasonic rice cooker, soy sauce, and sheets of nori. As long as there was electricity and water, I could make onigiri whenever I wanted. The greatest enemy of a long road trip isn’t gasoline or tire trouble—it’s the cost of food.

America was, and remains, a great hamburger nation. But eating them every day felt, at least to a young Japanese traveler, like a threat to one’s cultural dignity. So the solution was simple: cook the rice, shape it by hand, and wrap it in seaweed scented with soy sauce. To Americans unfamiliar with Japanese food, they might have resembled cannonballs or small bombs. To us, they were the ultimate survival weapon: onigiri.

First, See the Ocean

Sacramento is an inland city in California’s Central Valley. After six months in America, I still had not seen the sea. So only one objective had been decided before the trip began:

See the Pacific Ocean.

The destination was California State Route 1, the legendary highway tracing the Pacific coastline. During Japan’s bubble era, this road frequently appeared in television commercials for automobiles: sports cars gliding along cliffside roads above the ocean, freedom compressed into thirty-second images. I had always thought, Someday, I want to drive that road.

Today, parts of Route 1 remain closed because of landslides, with no definitive timeline for reopening. Which is why I often think: I’m grateful I had the chance to drive all the way to Los Angeles in 1991.

From I-5 to I-80

From the junction near my apartment, I merged onto Interstate 5 and headed north. As usual, shredded fragments of exploded truck tires littered the shoulder. Within minutes, I reached the downtown interchange and merged onto Interstate 80, turning west.

America’s interstate numbering system follows a remarkably simple logic: odd-numbered routes generally run north-south, while even-numbered routes run east-west. The eight lanes of I-5 narrowed to six, yet the broad concrete highway still stretched toward San Francisco like an airport runway.

The concrete highway shone almost white beneath the California sun. Each time the tires crossed an expansion joint, a steady rhythm echoed through the car—thump, thump, thump… Dry, mechanical, and strangely comforting, it was unlike anything I had known on Japanese expressways. As the morning traffic thinned, I reached for the RC Cola resting in the cup holder and pulled the tab. Snap. A brief metallic crack broke the silence, followed by the faint scent of cold carbonation.

Looking ahead, I realized the landscape had been reduced to just three colors: the white ribbon of concrete stretching toward the horizon, the green interstate signs suspended above it, and an endless California sky so blue it seemed to swallow everything else.

Suddenly, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle swept past me. Instantly, the familiar opening theme began playing in my head. It was CHiPs, the television series I had been obsessed with throughout the 1980s. Until that moment, this landscape had existed only on the far side of a television screen. Now I was here myself, hands on the wheel, driving through the very scene I had once watched from afar. I cracked the window open, and with the dry California morning air came a steady rhythm drifting into the cabin—thump, thump, thump—the hypnotic beat of tires crossing the joints in the concrete highway.

Vintage Volkswagen Bus

Passing through the flat agricultural lands outside Sacramento, I entered the neighboring college town of Davis. Somewhere along the way, a vintage Volkswagen Bus overtook me in a cloud of white smoke. It was a Volkswagen Type 2—the nostalgic machine that had become an icon of California surf culture, the kind of vehicle I had admired long before setting foot in America.

The van was packed shoulder to shoulder with cheerful college-aged kids. Some held cans of beer, others leaned out the windows laughing. When our eyes met, they shouted something I couldn’t hear and waved enthusiastically. Having arrived from Japan only months before, I remember thinking that the scene looked less like real life and more like a frame from an American movie.

I waved back, and then, unexpectedly, a trace of loneliness settled in. The California morning felt impossibly wide, and I was still standing at the very entrance of this journey.

I reached for my half-finished RC Cola. It had already gone warm. Even so, I raised the can in a quiet toast to the Volkswagen Bus disappearing beyond the windshield. Long after it was gone, the white smoke and the echoes of laughter seemed to linger over the highway, suspended in the bright California air.

Frame captured from original VTR footage filmed in May 1991. The image has been preserved as close as possible to its original recorded condition. — Captured from original footage recorded during a 1991 American road trip

From I-80 to I-880

The freeway stretched endlessly toward the horizon. Even at 65 mph (105 km/h), the speed felt strangely slow. It wasn’t simply because the roads were wider. The scale of the landscape itself was different. It wasn’t the speed that had changed. It was the scale by which I measured the world.

Eventually, I passed my beloved Nut Tree Airport and continued through the town of Vacaville. Soon afterward, I crossed the bridge spanning the Carquinez Strait. From the bridge, I noticed enormous structures floating in the water emblazoned with giant names like MAZDA and TOYOTA. At first glance, they looked like warehouses drifting at sea. In reality, they were massive Japanese Ro-Ro vessels carrying automobiles across the Pacific.

Crossing the bridge, I continued south with San Francisco Bay shimmering to my right and passed through Emeryville, where I left Interstate 80 and merged onto Interstate 880. Rather than crossing the bay immediately, I stayed on the East Bay side and planned to cross later via the San Mateo–Hayward Bridge.

How Did We Navigate a Foreign Country Without GPS?

The Interstate Highway System possesses its own internal logic. The transition from I-80 to I-880 represented more than an extra digit. It signified an auxiliary route branching from the parent interstate. If the first digit is even—2, 4, 6, or 8—it generally indicates a bypass or beltway around a city. If it’s odd—1, 3, 5, 7, or 9—it typically leads into the urban core. Even the numbering sequence follows geography, increasing from south to north and from west to east.

America’s highway network is astonishingly systematic. Once you understood the rules, relationships between roads revealed themselves almost instinctively. Today, navigation systems guide us effortlessly from point A to point B. Back then, things were different. A folded map rested on the passenger seat, while highway numbers and green signs served as the only instructions. It felt less like reading a map and more like listening to the roads themselves tell you where to go.

In the end, I drove for an entire week without getting lost even once. That was not because of any special skill behind the wheel, but because the American road system itself was remarkably well designed. This was still an era before GPS navigation and smartphones. I was deeply impressed by a country that had built such a simple, intuitive, and efficient network of roads. Even more remarkable, I could travel these highways for mile after mile without paying a toll. As a traveler following the road wherever it led, I could only be grateful for such generosity.

The car continued south. To my right, endless rows of containers lined the Port of Oakland as I followed Interstate 880 toward San Jose. Beyond the bay, the San Francisco Peninsula gradually emerged through the morning light.

At the time, I had no idea.

I did not yet know that the landscapes waiting ahead would remain with me for the rest of my life.

Continue the Journey →

▶ 1991 American West Road Trip Day1｜Road Map – Sacramento to Santa Maria

Articles from Day 1

Read the Japanese version →

Westbound, Then Skyward — Memoirs from the American West, 1990–1992 —

— Road Trip Day 1 (Morning) — Beginning a Road Trip Across the American West (1991) —