It’s June. I’m in the back seat of my beat-up red station wagon on Interstate-5, head out the window, hair blowing in the wind. Through my squinted, wind-walloped eyes I can see for miles in every direction–the inexhaustible planted rows of California’s central valley envelop me in their expanse. To the east and west, rugged mountain ranges curtly interrupt the ruthlessly cultivated landscape, framing it like a portrait of pastoral infinitude. I think to myself how nice it would be if I could stay like this for hours, but it hurts to blink, so I bring my head back through the window.

Several months earlier, I’m sitting in my freshman dorm room. As I hang up my phone call with the day’s umpteenth pushy booking agent, I turn to my band mate Jake and exhale, “We got L.A.”

“Looks like it’s all comin’ together!”

“’Bout damn time,” I moan with relief.

We’ve been ferociously booking our west coast tour for four months. Confident perhaps beyond our means, we contacted some of the biggest jazz venues on the West Coast, and then somehow managed to book them. The plan is to fly to Portland, Oregon for a show, pack my car, and road trip down the coast to four more shows in California.

The tour is our first real opportunity to prove our musical worth on a large scale, because everything about it is of our own creation. Bringing music on the road is a sort of right of passage in the music world. The prospect is exciting, but planning the tour successfully is proving difficult. The process requires meticulous attention to detail, and the regimented nature of it frequently overwhelms us to the point of frustration.

But in June, as we pull off I-5 onto an obscure western-bound highway on the way from L.A. to Santa Cruz, we find ourselves the only car on the road. Sam, our third band mate, pulls the car over and we get out and jump around like five-year-olds in the middle of the highway. Relishing the pointlessness of this experience, I think to myself how nice it would be if this feeling were more prevalent in my everyday life. Something about the simplicity of the affair erases all thoughts of the immeasurable tedium that got us here from my mind, and I suddenly appreciate the boundless beauty of brown rolling hills speckled with hay bales and a single solitary tree. A dull pain in my shoulder interrupts my sublime sentimentality. We are all getting sunburned, so we get back in the car and speed off.

Two shows and hours of driving later, we’re all getting a little stir-crazy. We’ve made it to the coast and are now traveling northbound, a spectacular view of the sea beyond an abrupt cliff to our left, jagged vertical rocks to our right. Several hours ago, we decided to take the scenic Highway 1, a decision we now strongly regret, as the perilous cliff and ceaseless curving have teamed up to prevent us from breaking thirty miles per hour in a hundred miles’ distance.

Jake decides to pull the car down a steep dirt road leading to the sea, and we get out to stretch. On a whim, I begin to run towards the ocean. Thinking neither about the freezing temperature of the Pacific, nor my lack of a clean pair of boxers, I jump in, fully clothed.

As Jake, Sam, and I rambled about Oregon and California, meeting new people and seeing new places every day, I realized that our tour wasn’t about promotion, reputation, money, or even music. For me, it meant developing relationships with people and places, not worrying about schedules, and enjoying meaningless experiences. As we trekked up and down the coast, something inside us shifted—the cutthroat, regimented disposition that had pervaded our preparations gradually faded, and road travel became a cathartic experience.

Months later, when the three of us would reminisce about our adventure, we wouldn’t speak of the performances or the music, the rigor of our musical preparations or the tediousness of the scheduling. What we remembered were the endless open fields, scenic drives, and ocean baths that truly made the trip worthwhile.

The sun is setting and it’s my turn to drive. We’re in some beach town between L.A. and Santa Cruz, scouring every street for any sign of an open restaurant. None in sight, I pull back up the onramp to the northbound interstate, drive a few miles, and pull off again. We find ourselves at a crotchety old seafood diner, the looks of which alone connote food poisoning. Starving, we accept our fate and reluctantly take a booth in the empty white shanty. An hour later, as we drive back onto the interstate that we have come to call home, eagerly awaiting what will happen next, we mutually agree that we had just eaten the best crab of our lives.