She Traded Her Badge for a Buick: One Woman's 50-State Journey Back to Herself

Renata Osei still remembers the exact moment she decided to leave. It was a Tuesday — always a Tuesday, she jokes — and she was sitting under fluorescent lights in a Columbus, Ohio conference room, watching a PowerPoint slide about Q3 projections, when a thought hit her so hard it almost knocked her sideways: I have no idea what drives me anymore.

Fourteen years in corporate logistics. Two promotions. A tidy apartment with a parking spot she barely used. On paper, everything looked fine. Inside, something had gone quiet.

Six months later, she was behind the wheel of a 1971 Buick Skylark — forest green, bench seat, a radio that picked up exactly three stations — crossing the Kentucky border into Tennessee with no return date on the calendar.

The Car That Started It All

The Skylark wasn't an impulse buy. Renata had grown up watching her grandfather tinker with old GM iron in his garage outside Atlanta, and when she spotted the car listed on Facebook Marketplace for $4,200, something clicked. She'd spent nearly a year getting it road-worthy — replacing the brake lines, rebuilding the carburetor with help from a retired mechanic named Dale she found through a local car club — before she even started mapping routes.

That process, she says, was the first hint of what was coming.

"I hadn't used my hands to actually make something in years," she told us over the phone from somewhere outside Bozeman, Montana. "Every Saturday I spent in that garage, I felt more like myself than I had in a long time. The car was already teaching me something before I even left the driveway."

There's real psychology behind that feeling. Research on what's sometimes called "flow states" — those moments of deep, focused engagement — consistently shows that hands-on, problem-solving work triggers a sense of satisfaction that desk jobs often can't replicate. For Renata, the Skylark became a literal and figurative vehicle for reconnecting with that feeling.

Planning the Unplannable

Mapping a 50-state road trip sounds romantic. The logistics, less so. Alaska and Hawaii alone require creative thinking — Renata budgeted for a ferry to Juneau and a separate flight to Honolulu, leaving the Buick stateside for those legs. The continental 48 she tackled in a loose loop over eight months, keeping a rough outline but leaving room for detours.

And the detours, she'll tell you, were the whole point.

In Marfa, Texas, she spent four days helping a sculptor weld a roadside art installation. In Fargo, North Dakota, she stumbled into a classic car show and ended up judging the "Most Miles Driven" category — the Skylark winning some informal bragging rights. Outside Portland, Oregon, she camped for a week with a group of overlanders who taught her how to read a topographic map.

"I stopped thinking of it as a trip pretty early on," she says. "It started feeling more like an education."

What the Road Actually Teaches You

There's a particular kind of clarity that comes from sustained motion. Therapists and psychologists have noted for years that travel — especially solo travel — has a way of stripping away the noise that accumulates in stationary life. When your daily decisions shrink down to which road, which diner, which campsite, the bigger questions have room to surface.

For Renata, those bigger questions had a lot to do with identity. Who was she outside of her job title? What did she actually enjoy? What kind of people did she want around her?

The Skylark, she points out, made those questions feel less terrifying. There's something grounding about a machine that demands your attention — that asks you to listen to its engine, notice when something sounds off, respond in real time. It kept her present in a way that her old life rarely did.

"When the car needs you, you show up," she says. "There's no overthinking it. I think I needed to practice that."

Life After the Finish Line

Renata crossed her 50th state — Hawaii — fourteen months after leaving Columbus. She's back in the continental US now, based loosely out of Asheville, North Carolina, doing freelance project management work remotely and writing a Substack newsletter about the trip that's quietly grown to nearly 8,000 subscribers.

The Skylark lives in a rented garage space. She drives it every weekend.

She's not holding the trip up as a blueprint for anyone else. Quitting your job and driving across America isn't a prescription — it's just what worked for her. But she does think the underlying impulse is worth paying attention to: that pull toward motion, toward something that feels alive, toward the version of yourself that got a little buried under the routine.

"I think a lot of people feel stuck, and they're waiting for permission to move," she says. "I didn't find some grand answer out there on the road. But I found enough small ones to keep going."

Sometimes, it turns out, that's exactly what drives you.