Pickup Nation

This December, two friends finished their last college finals and headed home. Zack drove his Chevy truck south to his home in Georgia. I drove my Toyota pickup north to Chicago. Along the way both of us took pictures of pickup trucks. From the novel to the impractical to the absolutely ridiculous, we did our best to photograph America’s more colorful pickup trucks.

And while we found some interesting trucks in the Midwest, Midsouth, and Deep South, nothing could beat the trucks we saw in Tucson, Arizona. When Zack and I met up in Tucson for some unrelated R&R, all the photos we had taken at our respective homes somehow seemed pretty normal.

Take this Tundra:

This truck would have been an outlandish truck by Midwest standards, but in Tucson, it's no more unusual than an F-150 extended cab in Ohio.

Or this Isuzu:

That’s right, it's an Isuzu pickup. Now those of you in Arizona may be wondering why I think an Isuzu truck is noteworthy, but those of us from out east(ish) never see these things. This is the first one that Zack and I had ever seen, and we’ve both been eyeing (and judging) trucks for years.

Here’s another example. I saw more Mitsubishi Raiders (for those of you that don’t know that’s the now discontinued rebadged Dodge Dakota that Mitsubishi sold for a couple of years) in my first afternoon in Tucson than I had seen ever before. To be fair, I had only seen one before.

Anyhow, Tucson’s remarkable collection of trucks aside, Zack and I compiled quite a few photos from our travels alone, and together. We decide to award some winners. Here they are: