It’s about half a day’s drive from where I sit now, on the tired carpet of a Ramada hotel room, to Seattle. Before you get started on us, it was 104 degrees yesterday and yes, we either could have camped or toughed it out and arrived home around midnight, we chose to do neither, opting for a good night’s sleep, a shower, and sanity. Our mosquito ridden campsites and truck stop showers have proven that we’re no sissies; our refusal to tough it out when there’s no need shows that we’re smart.
Yesterday we crossed the Rockies through Glacier National Park. It was a wildflower extavaganza and the sky was so bright, so blue. The road is a little asphalt shelf high along the mountains, every now and then there’s a stone archway to let a waterfall or creek continue downwards. We saw mountain goats finding their way up, up, up, at the pass, we saw more prairie dog hilarity (lord, those are funny critters) we saw flowers, flowers, flowers, did I mention the flowers?
Now, we’re back in the land of strip malls and traffic. And tonight, I’ll be in my own bed. We won’t have to pack up a wet tent, find our route for the day, figure out where to sleep, chase off bugs, wander around in the dark looking for the loo… it will be easy and sweet for the first night or two.
But after that, I am quite sure I will miss the road. There was not enough time for everything, anything, there never is. A day in Glacier? What kind of craziness is that? A week, that’s more like it. Flying through Montana’s abandoned little roadside towns? That makes the photographer in me die a little. Missing all the second hand stores where ukulele themed treasures languish, tossed out after someone’s uncle’s trip to Hawaii? Oh, just break my heart again, why don’t you?
Yes, I’m complaining even though the trip was the right side of perfect. Sure, there was a little bad weather, some ugly welts from biting bugs, and bad coffee. But there were no sour moments and wow, the US is a grand place to travel! Wow! You should go!
This afternoon, we’ll unpack the van and go for pho. Tomorrow morning, I will shuffle barefoot into my kitchen and make my tea exactly the way I like it. I will shop for vegetables and make big salads to counter the awesome greasy breakfasts and diner lunches of the road. I will sleep quiet in my own bed, in clean sheets. And in a day or two, I will wish, with no hesitation, that I was still traveling. Peter, Kelly? What about you?
You may have seen the phrase “This Is Travel Blogging” used a number of times on this site. In posts, on pictures or in tweets. If you haven’t, there are a few examples here, here and here. Take a look at the lead photo for this post. It looks glamorous, doesn’t it? Laptops all fired up in a hotel room. Beer. Smiles. Gadgets. “Ahhhh….that’s the life for me”, you might be thinking.
And that’s how we portrayed it our second night on the road. That photo was taken at Big Sky Resort in Montana. The wifi connection the night before wasn’t the best in our cabin (I was the only one to get on because, evidently, I have a Super Antenna(TM) that sucks all the wifi out of other laptops around me, or so Pam says) and we were happy to all have time to catch up. And we had beer. Once again, it looks glamorous, doesn’t it?
Reality is the flip side to this coin. In this case, the reality is we spent about two hours at that table, uploading photos, typing blog posts, pumping our adventure through Twitter. I then spent another hour in my own room after Pam went to sleep and kicked me out. Most nights were like this in one way or another. Some mornings too when Pam would get up early and write her posts.
It is a lot of work to keep on top of things while traveling. Kelly and I both don’t do well with reading/typing while in a car so that limited our time to write. Photos needed to be vetted, geo-tagged, uploaded and then corrected on the map. Batteries (laptops, cameras, GPS, Flip, TwitterFone(tm), etc…)need to be charged. An internet connection wasn’t always available where we camped. Oh yeah, and we needed to eat at some point. Stop me when it sounds like I’m complaining.
All in all, it IS a fun life on the road. I love the open road before me, driving and taking it all in. And I DO love staying connected and communicating with friends, family, strangers. But to do it well takes time out of the day. Some days we’d blow it off and as a result I lost tracking data as my GPS receiver wasn’t charged. No biggie, but annoying. Blog posts were later than expected. There is a noted absence of photos from some days.
Would it be easier to drive and not stay connected? Sure. We could have turned on the SPOT device and let it track our progress (it’s the one device that never needed a battery change). Nights could have included more sleep. We might have interacted with more locals rather than tweeting about our breakfast quality.
But that would have missed part of the point for this trip. For me, the idea was to make this trip as live as possible and help people feel they are along for the ride. Use words and pictures to share our experience and maybe inspire others to get out on the road this summer. To give the daily grind cubicle warriors out there a glimpse into another life beyond the 9-5 even if they are short on vacation time at the moment.
The personal motto I have slapped on my business card reads: “EXPLORE - INSPIRE - EDUCATE”. And that’s why I chose to take this adventure across the States with Pam and Kelly. Travel blogging, and in the case of live travel blogging, is a chance for me to do all three. I knew it’d be a lot of work. In the end though, it turned out to be fun work. And I can’t think of a better way to live life.
Kelly and I are parked in the Routan, drinking beer and eating pretzels. Our tent is pitched, our beds made, and we’d hoped to take a walk through “downtown” Medora to find out about the famous musical and the pitchfork fondue, but it’s raining, raining, raining. Hard. With thunder and lightning for extra flavor.
Earlier today, we drove down the Enchanted Highway — which was cool, indeed — in a massive hail storm, stopping at the end of the wacky, sculpture punctuated stretch in a Regent cafe.
“Oh NO! The crops!” said the nice lady behind the espresso counter, and then, “What can I get for you?” The manic tone of this conversation continued, “Oh dear, oh my, the hail!The crops!” following such mundanities as “What size drink?” and “Separate checks, dear?” She’d relocated three years ago back to her home town, but she’d been living just down the road from me in Burien, where, it turns out, she loved to go eat at my favorite Mexican joint. Twenty to thirty thousand people take the Enchanted Highway each year, we learned, and we also learned that the crops around us were sunflowers, canola, and soybeans, and wheat.
While we’re sticking to our routine of talking to strangers and bringing wacky sense of humor to our adventures, we do miss our third. Peter left us in Chicago to head off to Australia and now, pitching the tent is sound track free, as are a number of other events. I never would have guessed that three is a magic road trip number, but it is better than two because you’ve got one person in the back, minding their own business, napping away or thinking big thoughts, one person up front helping the driver with, well, everything including staying awake, and a driver. I’m absolutely comfortable enough to doze off while Kelly is at the wheel, but I feel like I’m shirking my co-driver duties when I do. Peter, we miss you.
Fargo was a terrible bust for camping, we caved and booked a hotel while perched in an absurdly named coffee house on Main Street. We hauled ourselves across North Dakota in a day, dulled into lethargy by the flatness of the eastern regions, pounded awake by pellets of hail in the afternoon. It was a long day with a lot of weird intervals. A Twilight Zone gas station in an abandoned town, a giant metal farm family, a campground serenade by a creaky duet in spectacular matching cowboy shirts. The fact that now, we’ve made the minivan into our happy hour cocktail room, complete with cold beer and snacks, well, that doesn’t seem so weird at all.
I’m going to tell you a secret, right here on the Internet and blow Leif Pettersen’s cover. Sure, that blog of his is full of snark, but you know what? Leif is a nice guy. A really nice guy.
Leif and his friend Rachel met us on the corner outside his building, they had a pocket full of quarters for the meter and a parking space scoped out for us. We went for a walk through the urban planning wonder of Minneapolis’ skyways, had coffee, and wandered back to Leif’s rooftop patio where we talked Flip Cam, TwitterFone, and fame.
Here’s a short clip of Leif talking about the Minneapolis skyways.
After a morning of Chicago traffic, we were ready for a stop. We were a few minutes outside of Madison when Pam sent out the tweet, “hey, we’re heading past Madison, anyone want to tweetup?” We were ready for a break and wanted an excuse to head into town. And…well we had such a great time meeting up with Thomas Ritchie via the Twitter in Iowa, we wanted to do it again.
Kathleen Perry aka Nomad Chicken came to the rescue. She was not only excited to meet us, but she was totally ok that we wanted to meet in the next twenty minutes. Not only did she treat us to a quick walking tour of downtown Madison, she also dished some great stories of her family’s recent four month trip to SE Asia and she gave us the most important advice of all…what to eat before we leave Wisconsin.
You may remember reading that someone told us Iowa was boring. Instead of heeding their warning and putting the peddle to the metal, we did the exact opposite. We took it slow, we met people, we took the back roads and were bound and determined to see the best that Iowa had to offer….in about 24 hours.
Our first stop was meeting with Thomas Ritchie, whose good natured attitude and advice convinced us that Iowa was not this boring place the rest of America likes to ignore. So, we set off into the land of cornfields and exited the maze with a newfound appreciation for the place.
We’d seen a lot of dramatic landscape on this trip and I had deemed myself the expert on when America got ugly. I won’t lie, I was poised and ready to announce this in Iowa. How exciting could it be to look at corn for miles and miles? Boy, was I wrong. The rows of corn formed formed weaving, textured patterns, enveloping everything around us. We were in the maze and we were happy to be there. It was green, it was alive, and you felt like you were in the midst of what was keeping America alive. (Albeit, through high fructose corn syrup, but I digress.)
I’ve also been enthralled with wind turbines this trip, there’s just something about those big white wings against a blue sky. I think they look their best in Iowa where they stretch across the horizon as far as the eye can see.
We also had some of the best camping we had on this trip. It was quiet, picturesque, and smack in the middle of a state park. We caught a beautiful sunset, an awesome lightening storm and watched the night fade into a sea of fireflies.
And we met super nice people in Iowa at both ends of the state. Thomas whetted our appetite and Bob of Jitterz Coffee sealed the deal. He taught Pam how to make her first latte, an important skill for a Seattlite to know. He also let us hang out in his shop in Dubuque for far too long, kept us caffeinated, fed, and connected to the outside world. As far as niceness goes, Iowa gets our vote for the nation’s nicest people.
