The Santa Monica Pier is behind you. The Pacific is in your mirrors. You’ve got 2,460 miles of I-10 ahead and a diesel tank that’s full to the brim. It is six in the morning and the Los Angeles freeway system is already half-awake and irritable, lanes merging badly, everyone in a hurry to get somewhere that probably isn’t worth hurrying to.

Push through it. The city takes about an hour to let go.

We ran this corridor in a 2021 Silverado 2500 with the L5P Duramax, stock except for a tune and an exhaust. Loaded light. No trailer. We wanted to know what the road was like, not what our truck could pull. We took seven days because there was no good reason to take fewer.

Los Angeles to Phoenix: The Desert Opens Up

Once you clear the San Bernardino sprawl and start climbing toward the Cajon Pass, something changes. The air gets drier and the traffic starts to peel off and by the time you drop into the desert proper east of Banning, you’ve got road in front of you that actually goes somewhere.

The stretch from Palm Springs to Blythe is about 120 miles of Sonoran Desert. Flat, wide and honest. The truck settles into cruise and stays there. Fuel economy on this section was the best of the whole trip, 19.4 miles per gallon, which surprised nobody who knows how diesels behave on long flat straightaways with no wind. We stopped in Blythe for fuel and a sandwich from a gas station that was doing better sandwich business than most delis we’ve been to. Highly recommended. No name on the receipt.

Cross into Arizona and the road starts working. Nothing dramatic, just long grades that rise and fall across high desert terrain, the kind that asks something of the engine without punishing it. Coolant temps climbed on the longer climbs but stayed in range. If you’re running a stock cooling system on a hot day in July, keep an eye on it through here.

Phoenix is a fuel stop and a night’s sleep. We stayed just off the 10 at a place that cost $89 and smelled like the previous guest’s cigarettes. The truck slept in the parking lot and was fine in the morning.

Phoenix to El Paso: The Long Middle

This is the section people don’t talk about because there isn’t much to say about it except that it’s long and empty and the sky is enormous. Tucson is 110 miles from Phoenix. After Tucson you’ve got about 230 miles to El Paso through some of the most open country in the lower forty-eight.

Deming, New Mexico sits roughly halfway. Population around fourteen thousand. One truck stop, one diner and a water tower. We stopped for fuel and ate green chile eggs at a counter with six stools, all of them taken by men who looked like they’d been sitting there since the Carter administration. The eggs were good. The coffee was better than it had any right to be.

The desert through here is different from California’s. Less dramatic but more insistent. It goes on and on in a way that gets into your head if you let it. We let it. There are worse things to sit with for three hours than open sky and a diesel at cruise.

El Paso sits right on the Rio Grande and the Texas state line. Cross into Texas and the road sign reads: El Paso 0, Houston 747. That’s not a typo. Texas is enormous and I-10 crosses all of it. We fueled up in El Paso, checked the tires because we always check the tires after a long desert run and found nothing wrong. Pushed on.

El Paso to San Antonio: Big Texas

West Texas gets a bad reputation from people who drove through it once at seventy-five miles an hour and didn’t pay attention. They’re wrong to dismiss it.

The stretch from Fort Stockton to Ozona is some of the best diesel driving on the whole route. Long grades, wide lanes, light traffic and the Chihuahuan Desert giving way to the beginning of Hill Country. The truck pulls beautifully through here. On a clear morning with good visibility and nobody in front of you, this is what the truck was built for.

Van Horn is worth knowing about. It sits at the intersection of I-10 and Highway 90 and it has a truck stop that is better stocked and better run than most of the ones you’ll find on the interstate. Clean bathrooms, which matters more on day three than it does on day one. Good fuel prices relative to the stretch ahead.

San Antonio is the first real city since El Paso and it hits you harder than you expect after two days of open country. Traffic thickens around the 1604 loop and stays thick through downtown. We ate dinner at a place on the River Walk that was full of tourists and ordered the brisket anyway because we were in Texas and that is the correct decision regardless of the crowd.

San Antonio to Houston: Flat and Fast

There’s not a lot to say about this 200-mile stretch that the road doesn’t say for itself. Flat, fast and occasionally foggy in the mornings, thick with eighteen-wheelers running freight between two of the biggest cities in the country. Stay alert, give the big trucks room and don’t be the person who camps in the left lane.

Houston took forty minutes to get through on a Tuesday afternoon. On a Friday it would have taken two hours. Time your arrival if you can.

East of Houston the landscape starts to change. The desert is well behind you. Pine trees appear and then take over and the air gets humid in a way you feel immediately if you’ve been driving through the Southwest for three days. The truck doesn’t care about humidity. You do.

Houston to New Orleans: Where the Road Gets Interesting

Beaumont is thirty miles east of Houston on I-10 and that’s where we picked up Jimmy Ray Hodges last month for our first driver spotlight. Running through his territory felt different after that conversation. We passed the Flying J where we’d met him at 4:47 in the morning and kept going east into Louisiana.

The Louisiana section of I-10 is something specific. The highway crosses the Atchafalaya Basin on a 22-mile elevated causeway above swamp and water and cypress trees. There’s nowhere to pull over. There’s nowhere to go. You’re just up there, moving through it. At dusk the water catches the light in a way that makes the whole thing feel like driving through a painting someone left unfinished.

New Orleans sits at the end of the causeway approach and we stopped for a full day because you stop for a full day in New Orleans or you have no business going there. The truck sat in a parking garage on Canal Street and we walked everywhere. We ate at a counter place on Magazine Street that had been open since 1964 and showed no signs of reconsidering that decision.

New Orleans to Jacksonville: The Home Stretch

The Gulf Coast section of I-10 through Mississippi and Alabama is green and flat and faster than you expect. Biloxi sits right on the water. Mobile has a bay crossing on a bridge that gives you a good view of the port before the road swings north and east into the Florida Panhandle.

The Florida Panhandle surprised us. Pensacola, Tallahassee, Lake City, each one a different kind of Florida from the one most people picture. The pine forests through here are thick and dark and the road runs straight through them for miles at a stretch.

Jacksonville comes up on you. One minute you’re in the trees and then the city is there, spreading out in every direction, the St. Johns River crossing marking the end of the run.

We pulled off at a Flying J on the east side of town and sat in the truck for a few minutes before doing anything else. The odometer read 2,461 miles from Santa Monica. The truck had used a little over 140 gallons of diesel across the whole run. Everything that was working when we left California was still working.

We got coffee. We found somewhere to eat. We called home.