A taxi ride to remember, from New York to Los Angeles (part-2).MOV

Hailing a taxi in New York City is hard enough, what with fighting off other would-be passengers and getting the attention of a swerving, speeding cabbie.
Getting the taxi to drive you from New York to Los Angeles? Fugghetaboutit.
At least that's what the father of John Belitsky, a former taxi driver himself, said when he heard about his son's plan to pay a cab driver $5,000 to bring him and his friend Dan Wuebben from the East Coast to the West Coast in one trip.
Six days and 3,000 miles later, Belitsky put an exclamation point on the journey with an unadorned post on his Twitter page: DONE.
Writing that word might have been easy, but the trek wasn't -- at least for Mohammed Alam, the cab driver who left his crying family behind to endure several sleepless nights with a pair of strangers. But he made it, with a little help from his new friends.
One of them, Wuebben -- an English professor -- explained in a YouTube video that he didn't hesitate when Belitsky pushed what he "just thought ... was a cool idea."
"And so when (Belitsky) said I'm going to do this, are you going to do this with me, I kind of just said yes, knowing that John has a lot of ideas," Wuebben said. "I just like tagging along."
Belitsky, an investment banker, was motivated by a desire to pay tribute to his father. But he also admitted online to having Hollywood dreams.
"At the moment, the running concept is that we're going to take it to some movie people when we get there and see what happens," he said to a camera being held by Wuebben.
But they couldn't do it alone, not without a real, live New York City taxi driver behind the wheel. This was going to be hard, as Belitsky learned when he asked one such driver -- who rolled up his window, without bothering to answer.
After thinking they'd scored a ride with another cabbie (who agreed to do it, only to be rebuffed by his boss, according to Belitsky's Twitter post), the two friends found Alam at LaGuardia Airport, in the Queens borough of New York City on April 16.
The three went to Alam's home, so the driver could pack some bags and say goodbye to his tearful wife, child and parents. Convincing them that it made sense for him to go was the first, but hardly the last, major challenge for the Bangladeshi man.
"I said, 'No crying. I will be fine," Alam told CNN affiliate KUSA. "I'll come back very soon."

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Autos & Vehicles

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• Taxi
• Journy
• NY
• 2
• LA
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• 2