I just spent 10 days road-tripping from Los Angeles to New Orleans and I never expected what I saw

For my summer vacation this year, I wanted to do what one good friend of mine called the "most American thing possible": a road trip.

My friend Jack had a writer's residency in Los Angeles, and we had been talking about checking out New Orleans for a while, so we decided to bridge the two cities by way of interstate.

Along the way, we'd check out parts of America I'd never visited: the open Southwest of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

I didn't expect to find sea lions, stalactites, and a guitar-playing horse along the way - but they turned out to be key characters in our adventure.