Father, son to document 5-day New England road trip
RIDGEFIELD — Following two years of limited contact and travel, one local man and his son have embarked on a five-day, roughly 1,700-mile journey along the perimeter of New England.
“There’s been a lot of isolation and limited travel due to COVID,” said Ridgefield resident and automotive enthusiast Roger Garbow. “Experiences, I think, are cherished a bit more now than they used to be, and we felt like this would be a good way to have a wonderful experience doing something that we used to take for granted.”
Garbow — who has an automotive sports marketing firm — said he came up with the idea of taking a coastal adventure with his 27year-old son, Ben Garbow, while brainstorming ways to promote Dutch company Vredestein Tire’s new all-terrain tires.
“I suggested trying to do something people haven’t done before — something that would not only showcase the new tires, but also be something memorable for me and my son,” he said. “We both like to drive and explore new places, so I came up with this circumnavigation of New England.”
Their five-day road trip adventure will also be documented.
“We have a film crew that’s going to follow us, filming and documenting the whole thing,” Roger Garbow said.
Not only will they have a film crew following them in a separate vehicle, Roger Garbow said, but he and his son will also take pictures along the way and co-write an article about their journey for a magazine afterward.
“We’re also going to be putting together a 15-minute video on our experience,” he said. “It’s going to be a travel log showcasing the places we go, but also the relationship and bond we have, and reconnecting.”
The road trip commenced at the crack of dawn on Friday, when Roger Garbow departed from Connecticut in his 2018 Subaru Crosstrek. After driving to and through Rhode Island, he planned to make his way to Massachusetts and pick up his son.
Ben Garbow — who’s lived in Boston for about a decade — said he’s looking forward to not only visiting parts of New England he’s never seen before, but spending quality time with his father.
“I’m excited to spend five days with my dad in the car for 1,700 miles or so, just catching up and spending time with each other,” said the 2012 Ridgefield High School graduate and Northeastern University alumnus.
“I’m looking forward to — I don’t want to say ‘reconnecting,’ because my dad and I have always been close — but spending a long uninterrupted amount of time with him, which has been increasingly rare as we both get older,” he added.
From Massachusetts, they’ll make their way up to Maine, Canada and Vermont before returning to Connecticut on Tuesday.
“We’re looking to cover a lot of ground in five days, see things we haven’t seen before, meet people and have some fun experiences,” Roger Garbow said, noting that they plan to take backroads and sideroads instead of highways.
“We’re going to be doing a lot of Route 1 — taking it all the way up to its terminus in northern Maine, where it just turns into dirt logging roads,” he said. “We’re also going to be hitting some cool sites along the way.”
Roger Garbow said their plans include visiting an automotive museum in Rhode Island, Subaru of New England headquarters in Massachusetts, driving on the Bar Harbor sandbar and going to the top of Cadillac Mountain to watch the sunrise in Maine.
“Each day we’re going to have a starting point and a destination, and whatever happens in between, happens,” he said. “If we see something cool, we’re going to go check it out. If we see an interesting sideroad, we’re going to go take that detour.”
They also plan to try different kinds of cuisine along the way.
“We want to try local food and beers, and kind of rate them and just have fun,” Roger Garbow said.
An experienced long distance driver, Roger Garbow has done five cross-country trips and several long, scenic road trips with his wife, including one around the entire perimeter of Iceland last summer.
Roger Garbow said he and his son took a road trip to Ohio three or four years ago, but they haven’t had a journey together like the one they are about to embark on.
“We haven’t done something like this, so we’re looking forward to it,” he said.
Roger Garbow said he wants the father-and-son trip to be a memorable one.
“I hope to really create some memories that we can pack away and have as an experience that the two of us did together,” he said.