Freelance Announcer Aika Kanda: “Unusual Travel Plans for This Summer” – “Me, Pink, and Sometimes New York” (Series #90)

Let’s try this year!

It’s that time of year again. It is the time of the year when I make travel plans for summer vacation, the most exciting and pressured time of the year.

Every year I travel with my husband during the summer vacation and with my mother during the year-end and New Year holidays. Since my mother is elderly, I choose a destination in a large city where it is easy to gather local information when traveling with her.

This is not the case when I travel with my husband. He likes to drive and wants to be active and drive around. Before we were married, when I told him I wanted to visit the southernmost city in the U.S. (excluding the state of Hawaii) and Kyiv, Florida, he said, “I’ve always wanted to go there, too!” He said, “I’ve always wanted to go there, too!” and that summer he really drove me the 260 km from Miami to Kyiv. He decided to propose to me in Kyiv, looking out over the endless Gulf of Mexico. He told me a few years after we were married that he got scared on the way there and returned home without being able to do so. I was so angry and wondered how romantic my memories would have been if he had really done it!　I was so angry, but I’ll leave that story for another time. Anyway, planning a trip with my husband, who sometimes goes to places where there is little information available, requires more careful preliminary research.

When we make plans, I arrange the airfare and accommodations, and my husband, who has a passion for eating, decides where we will eat each night. I am very particular about hotels, so this division of roles is wishful thinking. However, this summer’s travel planning was very difficult.

We love the U.S., and besides Kyiv, we have another goal that we want to try. That is to drive Route 66.

Route 66 is the old National Highway 66 that connects Chicago, Illinois in the Midwest and Santa Monica, California in the West, and is approximately 3,800 km long. This year we have been married for eight years, my husband is 53 years old and I am 45. Such a long distance gets harder as we get older. So we decided to take the plunge and try it this year! We decided to take the plunge this year.

To begin with, neither of us can take a vacation long enough to run approximately 3,800 kilometers at a time. So we had to think about how many kilometers a day we would run and from which airport we would return home. The only condition we decided on together was that we would take our favorite JAL nonstop flight to and from the airport. Therefore, we decided to start from Chicago and return from Dallas-Fort Worth. Due to the time difference, it was more convenient to travel from east to west, as it would be a longer drive.

However, Route 66 does not go through Dallas-Fort Worth. It passes through Oklahoma City, about 340 km to the north. Therefore, we decided to take Route 66 from Chicago to Oklahoma City and then to Dallas-Fort Worth, a total of about 1,800 km or 22 hours by car.

The more I look into it, the more anxious I get.

Now the next step was to book a hotel. My husband said we could drive about 400 km (5 hours) every day, so we followed Route 66 from Chicago on Google Maps to find a hotel. But we had never heard of any of the towns. Springfield, Illinois, and Rolla and Joplin, Missouri. （What kind of towns are they?) (What kind of town is it?) We looked into it and found that many of the towns did not even have streetlights, let alone a big supermarket.

（I felt a lot of pressure to find a hotel where my husband could rest and relax, something I had never done before. However, upon closer inspection, I realized that there were always hotels along Route 66 that were owned by major chains. （I could imagine that there were a lot of people who were facing the same challenge.) ) I could imagine that I was a bit relieved. Thanks to the greatness of the big chains, I made hotel reservations in each town. More than ten hours had passed since we started planning the trip. We managed to complete our itinerary. Then I passed the baton to my husband, who was in charge of finding delicious-looking restaurants.

The more I researched this trip, the more anxious I became. For example, ticks. I heard that ticks are found in rural towns in the United States. It was midsummer and hot, but it seemed essential to wear long sleeves and long pants, and boots if possible. There are also wild coyotes, I hear. I have seen many times in American detective dramas where the bodies have marks on them where coyotes have eaten them. So I never want to encounter a coyote.

The more I think about it, the more nervous I get about this Route 66 trip. It may take us a long time to complete the trip, but this year, the first one, “We will return home in good spirits!” we are both saying in unison.

His first book, ” Where do you go on the road called Royal Road? is now on sale!

Aika Kanda was born in 1980 in Kanagawa Prefecture. After graduating from Gakushuin University with a degree in mathematics, she joined NHK as an announcer in 2003, and left in 2012 to become a freelance announcer. Since then, she has been active mainly in variety shows, and currently makes regular appearances as the main MC of the daytime TV program “Poka Poka” (Fuji Television Network).

From the August 1, 2025 issue of FRIDAY