Resident brings the ‘American Dream’ to life in new book-Wethersfield Post

Resident brings the ‘American Dream’ to life in new book

By:John Fitts, Staff writer 04/24/2009

Many Americans dream of taking the great American road trip once the children are out of the house and the career is finally finished.

 

Wethersfield resident Glenn Maynard, however, decided to take the opposite approach.

“The common thought is to wait to retire and go RVing,” he said.

Maynard and his ex-wife however decided – “before the mortgage and the kids -let’s get that out of the way first.”

So in 1992, a week after their wedding, the two took off in a renovated 1978 Dodge Rockwood and spent a year on the road, visiting the 48 contiguous states and parts of Mexico and Canada.

Now Maynard’s experiences from that trip, which were originally written out on legal pads, have recently been published by Strategic Book Publishing under the name “Strapped into an American Dream.”

The trip consisted of 35,000 miles worth of amazing experiences as they traveled everywhere from the grandest of national parks in southern Utah to a Wyoming town with a population of six that urged visitors to “drive at a reasonable speed.”

Along the way they were shaken by earthquakes, saw twisters in Illinois, were nearly toppled by the wind on the Colorado plains (after finally leaving Kansas) and drove miles through the woods to reach a free campground in Maine – where they met a man with a dog named Molly – the same as their Miniature Schnauzer.

Although they saved the money from their wedding and were fortunate that their cars sold when they were on the road. The couple were forced to work for a time in an Arizona factory after nearly running out of cash.

The two also met an amazing cast of characters including gypsies and people who had UFO and Bigfoot stories.

“Small town America was unbelievable,” Maynard said.

At the time of the trip, Maynard recounted some of those experiences by sending accounts along the way to local newspapers, including the Glastonbury Citizen and Bristol Press.

Maynard, who has a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Connecticut, grew up in Glastonbury but Colorado proved so alluring, the couple lived in the Denver area for four years. After his divorce, Maynard moved back to Connecticut and has been in Wethersfield since 2001.

He said that after the trip, he typed his stories into a word processor and the book was essentially finished before he moved back to Connecticut. After the divorce, he rewrote the book slightly, taking out some of the honeymoon language but he said the book is 100 percent factual.

Along the way he had to retype it again into a computer and then came the long process of trying to sell it. He said he nearly gave up but Strategic took on the project and published the book in February. Maynard said he hopes to get the title into local stores – which is proving more difficult that he expected. For now it is available online through place such as Amazon.com,

It can also be found at http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/StrappedIntoAnAmericanDream.html

Some excerpts and other material can be found at http://www.squidoo.com/glen-maynard-the-american-dream

Maynard is also finishing a work of fiction. While he hopes to eventually write full-time, he is enjoying his job as a business analyst for United Healthcare.

“If it happens, it happens,” he said.

 

(http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20304102&BRD=1662&PAG=461&dept_id=11233&rfi=6)

©Wethersfield Post 2009