Daddy OnStar

By J.D. Reed

"I'm doing it alone, and that's that," said Gabrielle, 19, the youngest of my three daughters. She was calling from Tucson, where she had just finished her freshman year at the University of Arizona. What she insisted on doing all by herself was driving from Tucson to our home in Princeton, N.J., a journey of nearly 2,500 miles.

Her mother and I had been trying to persuade her for weeks not to do it. My wife offered to fly to Tucson and drive back with her, the reverse of how the car got to Arizona last fall. It wouldn't work, Gabby said. The entire interior of the car, with the exception of the driver's seat, was packed with her stuff.

I'm a glass-half-empty kind of guy. So a host of prime-time consequences ran through my brain, from serial killers to Force 5 tornadoes. My wife, a glass-half-full kind of woman, reminded me that our daughter is "19 and there's no stopping her." True. Switching into can-do mode, my wife and I sent Gabby a U.S. map with the route home marked in yellow and a list of rules: If you break down, call AAA on your cell phone and do not unlock your door for anyone but a policeman or the tow truck. Park as close as you can to the motel entrance and under the brightest lights. Don't speed. Don't drive when you're exhausted. Call us every 100 miles or every two hours, whichever comes first.

My wife promptly left town for a conference, leaving me, a semiretired journalist, in charge of this teen version of The Cannonball Run. The most likely problem, I thought, would be car trouble. Gabby drives a 1994 Volvo that she has personalized with dents, scratches, parking tickets, missing wheel covers and a trunk that won't open. But the indestructible Swedish oldsters don't flinch at being driven over curbs or smacking poles in parking lots.

She rolled out of Tucson on a Friday afternoon after her last final exam, armed with her cell-phone headset and the U.S. road map. In Princeton I had maps, phones and a laptop with a wireless Web connection. What evolved was a happy surprise for both father and daughter.

Gabby called as she left Tucson, and we talked almost hourly that first day. Sometimes I called her to find out where she was and remind her to check the oil when she fueled up. Sometimes she called me just to talk because the route was "so boring." It was often hard to hear her over the background noise. She drove with the windows down and the CD player blaring.

To follow her progress, I fired up the laptop and tuned Internet Explorer to mapquest.com I soon found, however, that the AAA site, with its detailed maps and accurate information about detours and construction, was faster and more flexible. Late Friday evening the traveler, exhausted from finals, was ready to call it a night. I clicked to expedia.com and made a motel reservation for her in Tucumcari, N.M., about 50 miles ahead.

With my maps and the Internet, I had become Daddy OnStar. Like the satellite service available on high-end General Motors cars, I was standing by 24/7 to pinpoint locales, list available services, check distances and dispatch help in case of trouble.

On Saturday morning, Gabby called to say that the motel I'd arranged was, as she put it, "nasty." She'd get her own from now on, thank you. Some things are better done with the eye than the mouse.

Wherever I went in the house, I carried both cordless and cell phones and the laptop. At one point, I was under the bathroom sink, failing to unblock the U bend, when she called to say, "I'm coming up on Oklahoma City. How do I get from I-40 to I-44?" A few mouse clicks, a look at the map, and I was able to talk her through the interchange. (That happened more often as she moved east to larger cities like St. Louis, Mo., and Indianapolis, Ind.) On the second night, Gabby found a place to stay in Rolla, Mo., west of St. Louis. And the next day, Sunday, she blasted through Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 16 hours and 11 phone calls home to arrive in our driveway at 3 a.m. (the less said about her average speed the better).

Looking back on the trip, Gabby and I recall feeling amazingly secure and connected during this entire improvised exercise. Her cell-phone bill was another matter. In addition to the calls to me, she had whiled away hours chatting with her friends. Still, for her trip back next fall, we're going to reverse the process, with the addition of some sort of GPS device--and keep our fingers crossed.