Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip (2003) Review

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(More customer reviews)Horatio Nelson Jackson bet a group of men in San Francisco $50 he could drive an automobile coast to coast in three months or less, something which had never been done before.
"You're on," they told him, and the next day Jackson searched for a suitable vehicle. He spent $3,000 on a 1903 Winton Touring Car, hired a mechanic to accompany him on the drive, and three days later left the city by the Golden Gate heading for the Big Apple.
The duet became a trio when Horatio Jackson brought aboard a light-colored, good-natured bulldog named "Bud" in Caldwell, Idaho.
Jackson back-tracked the trails of westward migration. He introduced the dawn of a new age to a soon-to-be-passing way of life.
He encountered a wagon train heading for the last free land in the Great Northwest. He waited for a stage coach to bring him new tires. He had his automobile repaired at blacksmiths shops. He crossed mountain ranges, forded streams, and got the car stuck in buffalo wallows.
Horatio Nelson Jackson and his mechanic, Sewell Crocker, embodied the American ideal that you can accomplish the impossible with pluck, grit, and determination. They managed to cross the continent by automobile in just over two months and thus win the bet.

The story is superbly told by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns. Jackson's letters home to his beloved wife, Bertha, or "Swipes", as he calls her, are read by the peerless Tom Hanks.
Behind the narration and the telling of the story is a very lively soundtrack which makes viewing the film most enjoyable!
The documentary, "Horatio's Drive," is Americana at its best.
Don't miss it!

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Horatio's Drive recounts the simultaneously inspirational and hilarious saga of Horatio Nelson Jackson, an eccentric Vermont doctor, who in 1903 - on a visionary whim and a 50-dollar bet - became the first person to drive an automobile across the continent, heralding the future of the "horseless carriage" as a vehicle destined for more than inner-city travel and as a machine that would transform American life.

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