Quote Originally Posted by Nevada27 View Post
After reflecting a bit, I think driving 2500 miles alone in less than 2 days was a bit reckless and I am probably lucky to have made the trip safely.
I would completely agree and I'm glad you've learned a lesson from this. I will note one frequent misconception about fatigue is that you can just stop when you're tired - the problem is by the time you are so tired that your brain understands it must stop, you've almost certainly driven many miles where fatigue has been compromising your driving abilities. A fatigued brain just can't make good decisions - which includes knowing when to stop!

There are also too many states to cross with relatively few things to see/do especially if you are traveling from the Northeast since you are ~2000 miles away from the western edge of the Great Plains.
To me, this statement is perhaps the even more disappointing outcome of the approach to your trip. You were so singularly focused on getting out west as fast as humanly possible (or faster) that you never had a chance to consider much less see any of the amazing things you certainly drove right on past. And then it becomes a self-fulling prophecy, because since you drove past a million amazing things you might have enjoyed, it left you with the conclusion that you were right and there were "relatively few things to see" and that it was nothing but monotonous cornfields and farms.

I just never imagined the whole thing would go the way it did.
You can at least take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. One, almost anyone who has done any significant amount of roadtripping- especially when you're younger, have a smaller budget, and usually an older vehicle - has had to deal with breakdowns on the road.

Two, there are plenty of people who have learned the hard way the downfall of an approach to a roadtrip where you drive like a madman to "get somewhere" only to discover that doing so has made it very difficult to enjoy the "somewhere" you were trying to get to - or they've tried to pack so much in that when something doesn't go to plan (and there's always something unexpected that will come up) that it ends up throwing off the entire rest of the trip. When I find people who hate roadtrips, it's very frequently because their only experience has been this same kind of approach that's nearly always going to end in a bad time.

If you take this as a learning experience, and change your approach, I think its entirely possible you could try again and replace that sour taste with an experience that's much more in line with what you were hoping for.