Michelle Merrifield and Abby Lopez, both 22 and wearing lime green baseball caps bearing the legend “Roadtrip Nation,” are sitting on a red couch in front of a lime green RV parked on the University of Illinois lot on South Halsted. It’s a perfect day for recruiting: Indian summer is in full swing, and students passing by are inclined to dawdle, talk, and peruse the promotional materials on display. Merrifield, an outgoing, slender blond with a broad Australian accent, hails a couple of guys on their way to class. “Want to go on a road trip this summer? All expenses paid for?” she asks them. Surprise: the boys stop to chat.
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Roadtrip Nation began in 1999 at Pepperdine University, where Gebhard, a business major, shared a dorm with his childhood friend, premed student Marriner. Both hated their majors, so in their junior year they decided to take a semester off and hit the road–not to look for America or follow a jam band, but to collect success stories. Their plan was to set out in a rented RV with a list of entrepreneurs and business leaders who’d done well for themselves in unconventional fields, interview them, sell the interviews to magazines to finance further travel, and eventually, they hoped, find out what they wanted to do with their lives. “We could see the next 30 years totally rolled out,” says Marriner. “And for the first time we stopped and said, Is this what we really want to do? Or is it based on the noise of what society is telling us to do?”
Although they never actually sold any interviews, they did attract the mentorship of Jeff Taylor, CEO of the online job placement Web site Monster.com. Taylor was so taken with their project that he offered to underwrite their wanderings. In return he asked only that they display a Monster.com logo on the side of their vehicle. The two happily accepted.
Just before taking off, the four friends slapped a coat of lime green house paint onto their RV. “It was a 1985 Pace Arrow on its very last legs, a real piece of shit,” says Marriner. “We wanted to make it stand out somewhat, and we picked the color because it was attention getting, plus it didn’t have any specific brand associations or anything, so we felt we could make it our own.”
With their own student years receding behind them, the road trippers are working to package and perpetuate the Roadtrip Nation experience for the benefit of other uncommitted college kids. McAllister and Gall are in charge of the movement’s campus outreach initiative, Behind the Wheel. “What we want to do is launch our story and have that be version one, generation one,” says Marriner. “And every year you have new generations of students that we facilitate. We put them on the road, they do their own road trips, we film it.”
A sleepy-eyed UIC student with dreadlocks approaches Lopez, who’s standing next to an iMac display.
“Right.”
