Why 3 Travel Bloggers And A Minivan Is An Excellent Configuration For A Road Trip

Crew note: We realize that because VW is one of our sponsors, the tone of this post sounds suspiciously advertorial. We  want to assure you that all the stuff Peter says here is actually absolutely true.Just FYI in a CYA sort of way.

In a nutshell, this trip has been an absolute blast.  I’m not bragging.  I’m only bringing it up because I’ve been dissecting what’s happened these last eight days to find out what has made this trip such a complete success (while noting Pam and Kelly still have to drive BACK to Seattle).  And I think I’ve come up with some answers I’d like to share for those pondering such an endeavor.

1) Get A Mini Van - I never thought I’d say this out loud or type it in the semi-permanence of the Internet, but a minivan is a wonderful option for a road trip.  Maybe I’m just getting old or possibly more sensible.  I’ve road tripped in many a vehicle; station wagons, vans, Suburbans, sports coupes, Jeeps.  Nothing compares to the sensibility and ease of use I’ve found with our minivan.

Thanks to Pam and her connections, we found that VW was quite excited about lending us a Routan for the journey to Chicago and back.  And we were excited to have a vehicle to drive!  The Routan, named Snuffleupagus, arrived approximately 20 hours before out set departure time and it was oh so pretty.  All clean and new with only 6000 miles on the odometer.

As I write this post, now 2621.1 miles and 8 driving days since our departure, I can state with a firm tongue that the Routan is an excellent choice for a road trip.  It has a storage all over the place, including a sunken trunk that swallowed up our camping gear and travel bags and kept them well below the review view glass.  There is storage under the floor behind the front seats, excellent for muddy shoes or things not needed often.  Cupholders!  There are eight cupholders up front (most of which became gadget holders for us), sliding side doors with roll down windows making road side photography a breeze and a sunroof.  Our model was the base S model, without the fancy DVD players, navigation system or 110V outlets.

We average around 21MPG for the trip with the AC on most of the way with the minivan loaded pretty lightly.  Cruise control on the Routan worked quite well, keeping us up to speed on the most demanding hills.  And the manual override for the six speed transmission is located close to the wheel, making downshifting to pass traffic safe and easy.  With one of the mid seats flipped up there was plenty of room for a cooler and the three power outlet were enough to keep our massive thirst for battery charging sated.  I really liked that the middle slide doors created easy ingress when jumping out to grab a camera tucked next to the cooler.

The biggest gripe we all had for the Routan was the driver’s seat ergonomics.  For me, there wasn’t ample lumbar support and instead it allowed me to slouch too much while the the headrest pushed my neck forward.  Instead of cradling me, it forced me into a C shape that was uncomfortable after three hours.  The passenger seat was the same but didn’t require upright seating and thus was more comfortable slightly reclined.  Oh and the wipers. None of us figured out the wipers the first time each of us went to use them.  Those who had mastered the use still weren’t able to explain their use to the others.  They just seemed a bit odd to control and I’ve driven a VW Passat for five years.

2) Three Is A Really Great Number - Three travelers, be they bloggers or not, is really a great number for a roadtrip.  Again, I’ve traveled with groups from one to six and I found the three of us on this trip to be a perfect combination.  It gave us ample room in the Routan whereas four would have been just a bit more cramped.  It also allowed us to divide up the jobs; passenger seat was for navigation and handing things to the driver while back seat was the designated TwitterFone(tm) and napping spot.  The far back seat held items needed while driving, but not needed all the time.  While the VW would have held seven of us, I can’t imagine taking the trip with that many bodies.

Plus three people move better.  It’s still a small group so unloading and reloading was easy with no one in the other’s way.  No need to climb over the seats into the back.  Not to mention three people can decide on music easier than four or more.

3) Relax - None of us are uptight people and I didn’t realize this until a few days into the trip.  As mentioned previously, we really didn’t know each other that well before taking off last week.  Would they like listening to Jimmy Buffett when I wanted to chill out and Pink, Disturbed or Chemical Brothers when I wanted to drive faster?  What would camping be like with strangers?  And route finding…..are they the type of people to freak out when we make a wrong turn?

It turns out we are all fairly relaxed people when it comes to that little stuff.  And that was a huge relief once the reality of it sunk in.  Pam and I often sang along to most songs (even when we got Billy Joel lyrics wrong ), Kelly took to camping like a fish in water and many a ‘wrong’ turn was made with only a shrug of the shoulders and second check of the map.  We all knew we’d make it eventually.  No freak outs, no shouting matches.  Just going with the flow and adapting when needed.

Is three travelers and a minivan the ideal setup for your next road trip?  I can’t say with 100% certainty.  I do know that for this trip to TBEX it’s been the perfect configuration for me.

Mount Rushmore and Badlands National Park; WOW!

Siggy was a recent high school grad from Poland who we picked up hitchhiking in Big Sky, Montana.  Siggy told us not to go to Mount Rushmore.  He seemed to know what was best about our country as he had literally just flown into Chicago and then drove, with four of his buddies, to Big Sky on the West side of Yellowstone National Park.  An outsider’s view.  We listened to his advice, ponder it for a few hundred miles and expected to see a rather small representation of some of our most beloved presidents.

But Siggy was wrong.  Dead wrong.  On day five of the TBEX road trip we woke up just five miles from Mount Rushmore National Memorial.  Our campsite near Horse Thief Lake was quiet and just a bit dewy, but the skies held promise of a crystal clear viewing.  We had decided to not show up at 8pm with overcast skies the night before, in favor of catching the morning glow on the faces of those four, chiseled presidents in the morning.  It turned out to be a grand choice. 

Siggy did have one valid point.  As you can see from the photo above, most pictures taken of Mount Rushmore look a lot like the postcards for purchase in the gift shop.  It’s hard to really capture a different view of the presidents the way it’s possible to capture the many moods of, say, volcanic mountains like my favorite, Mt. Baker Washington.  And with only an hour and a half in the park, we weren’t going for any award winning shots. 

For me, the most exciting part was watching the making of Mount Rushmore in the park’s visitors center.  The 15 minute film is narrated by Tom Brokaw, a South Dakota native, and is an incredible story of the nearly two decades it took to sculpt the mountain.  Considering the tools available in the 1920s, I’m still amazed at the quality of the work finished.  It’s on a scale hard to comprehend and yet, there they are, staring across the Black Hills.

While this area of South Dakota holds many treasures, we don’t have time to discover them all on this trip.  And soon enough we were back in the car heading for Rapid City for breakfast.  Ahhh breakfast.  As Pam mentioned in her last post, breakfast is our main meal of the day and by now is highly anticipated.  While the breakfast in Rapid City was situated in the cute, tree covered, bronze presidential statued lined streets of downtown Rapid City, the surliness of the wait staff and slowness of delivery left much to be desired.  But nothing cheers up the day like posing with Ronald Reagan! (pictured at left)

Grasslands, grasslands, grasslands.  That’s what comes after Rapid City on the way to Badlands National Park.  It’s also what comes AFTER the Badlands.  Split into two distinct section, we opted for the more popular North district after a stop at the visitors center, which included another video not narrated by Tom Brokaw.  But it did a great job of showing the park in its many moods, complete with Buffalo that had eluded us, nocturnal ferrets we’d never see and freezing blizzards in the winter months.  Done with the video, it was time to see some seriously bad land.

Below are but a sample of the awesome geology and sights to be had on the drive along Highway 240 towards Wall and I-90.  It’s yet another park we wish we had extra time to explore but will have to save for another day.

Whoa, That’s Some Big Sky: Day Two On The Road

Day two started out odd for this road tripping, travel blogging crew.  We hit traffic in Sandpoint, Idaho of all places.  Not much, but then we needed fuel, which, obviously, led to a discussion with a gentleman at the gas station about the health care plan before Congress.  Pam has told us she attracts all kinds of strangers to talk with her and this was my and Kelly’s first experience with it. 

With that oddity out of the way, and with Pam courageously taking up the driving, we headed out East from Sandpoint on Hwy 200 on the suggestion from Lisa Gerber.  Hwy 200 is a great trip around the North and East sides of Pend O’Reille (pronounced Pond Oray I believe) as we wound through pine tress and the swamp lands of the Pack River.  Hope was our first destination and a seemingly good way to start the day.  But Hope is never what you think it should be, and the one joint in town that open really didn’t seem interested in feeding us.  Onward!

Soon after this point, I fell asleep.  Kelly and Pam say things were pretty as we left the lake and started following the Clark Fork River.  I’ll take their word for it.  I did briefly wake up at Noxon (our first town with a palindrome name!) as we hunted for breakfast.  Soon after we crossed into the Mountain Time Zone, quickly making breakfast a brunch affair when we found it in Thompson Falls, Montana. 

Big cinnamon rolls and a bear greeted us inside the front door of Minnie’s Montana Cafe, a likely spot filled with locals and just a few of us tourists.  Well past noon, we were happy to see it was a true cafe, offering breakfast all day, although Morgan, our waitress, warned us everything was big.  It’s a common Montana theme; Big. Big Sky, Big Pancakes Pam couldn’t finish, Big Hats, Big Chevy that took us to get beer later in the evening, Big Drunks at the bar where we bought our beer.  Everything here is indeed, Big, with a capital B.

Heading East and South out of Thompson Falls the geology changes to stratified hills laid bare on one face and the road goes from constructed to under construction.  Slow, slow, slow.  South, South, South until the speedway of I90 is again obtained near Butte with its 90′ tall Madonna on a hill.  We jack up the speed and fly up one side of the Rockies and down the other.  Some place along there was the Continental Divide but we missed the sign. 

Let me take a moment to explain one piece of amazing technology on this trip.  It’s called the TwitterFone(tm).  I’m sure it has another name, maybe even a model number, but for us, it’s a phone that connects us to Twitter.  And Twitter has been a valuable resource on this trip; finding us stops, helping us realize that 90′ tall Mary was not, in fact, not a statue of Jesus as I first thought and in general helping make this trip more interactive, fun, connected.  The Twitter phone is relegated to the back seat passenger with the shotgun seat reserved for navigation.  It’s a tight ship we run.  If you’re curious to follow and possibly help out (we need places to stay in Iowa, for instance) follow along with @nerdseyeview, @kag2u and @pwcarey as any one of us might be in the TwitterFone(tm) seat.

Pine!  Can you smell that piney smell?  Working out way South on Hwy191 towards Big Sky the pine jumped through the ventilation of Snuffulupagus raising spirits as the canyon walls killed reception for the TwitterFone(tm) (which also has Google Maps when we get lost).  Our sunroof became invaluable to me for scopping out tanned rocks along the road, dreaming of spending days climbing in this area.  The Gallatin River carved our path through the hills until we reached Big Sky, where the confusion started.

Our problem with the finding our accommodations for the night is Big Sky is Big!  The Big Sky Resort consists of three separate hotels, a mall, golf course, ski resort and more.  It’s Big.  With some meandering and asking around, we found our comfy rooms on the third floor.  The hotel seems to really be pushing the ‘green’ concept in a good way.  Compact fluorescent lights through out, ‘eco’ soap and hair products and signs about it here and there.  Settling in, and then grabbing some beer to go at a surly local bar (noting you can still smoke in bars in Montana), we set to the task of organizing the days thoughts, catching up on email, downloading photos and the general task of blogging on the road.  While I know the picture makes our life on the road look tremendously glamorous it’s still time consuming and work.  Fun work, but still work.  Ok, lame attempt asking for pity is done.  Back to looking for buffalo!!