About

About Sean

At the age of twenty, I had never taken an airplane ride. Ten years later, I had visited 34 states, a dozen countries, and racked up enough frequent flyer miles to fly business class to Europe on my honeymoon.

I grew up in Southern California and a trip to Sacramento for a History Day competition in high school was about as far away as I'd gotten by the time I entered college. In 1997 I began my first year as an Electrical Engineering major at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. My roommate that year was Inaugural Road Scholar Chris Pasley. He and I went to the same high school but we never really hung out. After a year of living together in a 20 x 25 room, I didn’t think we ever needed to hang out again.

A summer apart however, and that tune changed. During our winter break in 1998, Chris and I took a road trip to Vegas together. We couldn’t gamble or drink but we didn’t need to, our destination was the Las Vegas Hilton and the Star Trek Experience. How cool were we?! I think that’s the trip that started it all. I’ll reflect more on that in my book. Let’s get on with the history lesson.

Chris and I were inspired. We planned two additional trips: one to Yosemite for the spring of 1999, and one mother of all road trips that would take us across the country during the summer of 2000.

In March of 1999 I accepted a six month co-op assignment with a biomedical company. The job required that I fly all over the country to test clocks on hospital equipment to see if it would explode at the dawn of the year 2000. Yosemite got canceled.

The Y2K testing experience was the farthest and longest I’d ever been away from my friends and family. I started sending out weekly updates to keep my family up to date on how I was doing. Whenever I received an email from someone asking how things were coming along with my co-op, I added them to my mailing list. Before I knew it, I had a bit of a following and people couldn't wait to live vicariously through my writing. It would be another year before TRS was officially born, but the Y2K testing updates was surely its conception.

Enough About Sean, What About TRS?

Chris and I were on a travel rush. For the summer 2000 road trip we decided to go big. It was the height of the dotcom boom and we were inspired by DotComGuy, a twenty-something UPS employee who quit his job and for an entire year didn’t leave his house in order to prove that anything one needed could be obtained using the Internet.

Our own endeavor, dubbed the Year 2000 Road Trip Extravaganza (Y2KRTE) was to be a round trip circle tour of the U.S. covering 12,000 miles in 45 days. In DotComGuy style, we would get corporate sponsors to underwrite the trip in exchange for my witty accounts of life on the road. It turns out we were broke college students with no corporate marketing connections, so what actually happened was something a little more…modest. But we did get T-shirts.

Sponsors or not (we did have a few), the trip was fantastic—the experience of a lifetime. We ended up flying to New York using a novel new business concept called Priceline. From there we rented a car and, in 24 days, drove through 25 states back to California. We put 6,542 miles on our high performance two door Chevy Monte Carlo (with air conditioning).

Here's what amazed me most about the experience—besides the fact that I was literally paying the trip off for the remainder of my college career: in 24 days on the road, we spent only five nights in a hotel. Chris and I collectively knew people all across the country and, what's more, they were all more than eager to make us part of their family for a few days.

The essence of TRS is experiences with people. Some of those people have traveled with me and are bestowed official Road Scholar status. There’s also a few people who clearly possess TRS spirit (some have contributed their own stories on this site) but have not technically taken a trip with me. I call them Honorary Road Scholars. You can meet them all here.