We made this video last night during the storm, but it took literally all night to finish uploading. I would like to point out before you watch this that we did not practice, rehearse or do anything on purpose. This is a direct consequence of spending toooo much time in a car.
And yes, we did make it up at 4:30. Its 4:43 Mountain Time right now. 🙂
Despite how it ended, today was absolutely amazing! I’m having trouble with deciding if I should start at the beginning of the day or the end. Hmmmm. Well, I guess I could start by saying that I’m currently sitting in a cabin — excuse me, kabin — at a KOA near Colorado Springs. And while I’m disappointed that we pansied out and are sleeping inside four walls, I’m over it already. We spent most of the evening outrunning a storm and it finally caught up to us.
After we left Rocky Mountain National Park (more on that later), we skipped out on stopping in Denver to try to get to Pike’s Peak before it closed. Fail. We arrived at the gates about 15 minutes before they were locked up for the night. So we doubled back to go to Garden of the Gods. Semi-fail. The clouds of the impending storm were already rolling in, so the park was rather dusky and we couldn’t really get any good pictures. We plan to go back in the morning for a few quick photos before heading to New Mexico.
And here’s where things really started to get interesting. We had called ahead to confirm availability of a campground at Garden of the Gods campground, and I was told that we didn’t need to make a reservation. Well, after some difficulty finding the campground, we had even more trouble finding anything in it. We had to use a map taped to the door to discover that we needed to exit the park and take a side road to get to the tent campgrounds. We finally found the street and it was dark and none of us were particularly comfortable with it. The road dead ended inot what looked like a gravel pit where everyone pitched their tents together and parked their car back down the street.
Considering the thunder and lightning going on all around us and the creeepy man sitting alone at the only tent pitched in the gravel pit, we were ready to get the heck outta Dodge. In my hours of research before this trip — make fun of the nerd, but I saved us today! 🙂 — I found a KOA about 15 minutes from the Garden of the Gods campground. We made a quick phone call, secured a cabin reservation and ended up here. The rain moved in about as soon as we got here, and sitting in my air conditioned cabin, I was never happier to not be in a tent.
I know I’ve been promising to post pictures and video, but I’m having serious technical difficulty this trip. First my camera battery died and the charger I just bought that worked at home, no longer works. So I bought a cheap digital camera from Wal-mart. Today, I completely filled the hard drive on my laptop when I cleared the memory of my flipcam. (The external hard drive I currenly have is already full of pictures and video.) And even though I have Wi-Fi, it’s not the fastest thing and I’ve been unsuccssful at uploading anthing thus far.
I know, Promises, promises. But I am trying. 🙂
Where do I even begin? Last night we camped at Bonny Lake State Park, barely over the state line in Colorado. It was about 9:30 p.m. before we arrived, and we were tired. We hadn’t eaten since lunch, but no one realized that until this morning.
We pulled into the park in the pitch-black darkness with one heckofa thunderstorm visible in the distance behind us. We had been watching the lightning on the highway for several miles already.
The dark county road we followed to get to the entrance of the park was a little creepy and covered in frogs. We couldn’t see anything beyond the beams of our headlights and bugs were hitting our windshield at such a high frequency it sounded like it was raining. At one point, we saw some kind of animal sitting in the road, then it spread its huge grey wings and flew away. It was an owl — the first one I’ve seen outside the zoo. I have video, but of course I can’t post it until I get to Wi-Fi tonight.
All the way into the park we kept questioning our decision to stay there. The creepy blackness coupled with a few beer cans dropped along the road like breadcrumbs leading us to the campground had us all a little uneasy. We found the source of the noise easily enough. Set up right at the entrance was a couple groups of rowdy guys enjoying their Saturday night. Fortunately for us, a park ranger stopped to help us find a spot.
He said, “I’ve already had to get on those guys once tonight, and I’ll have to again later. You don’t want to stay by them. If you want, you can follow me and I’ll take you to a nice spot.”
The park ranger appeared middle-aged and seemed like a genuinely nice person. He took us around to another loop in a quieter area. And then the real fun began.
I must say, putting up a tent in the dark wasn’t nearly as difficult as I expected it to be. It helped that we had a superbright lantern. The worst part was the bugs. They were in swarms and biting. There was an all you can eat buffet above my elbow on the back of my arm. I have my own rendition of the Rockies made from welts formed from bug bites.
It rained all night, but the sound of rain hitting the tent was kind of relaxing. The wind whipping was a little unnerving at times, but that’s only because we only had the corners of the tent staked down. We thought we had left the tent stakes at home, but it turned out we just lost them on the ground in the darkness. We found them this morning as we were packing up.
We’re almost to Rocky Mountain National Park. 🙂 I’m absolutely thrilled, even if I will be using a cheapie camera from Wal-mart. (Why did my camera have to die now?)
I’m expecting to have Wi-Fi tonight, so I should be able to get the long-promised photos and video posted late this evening. 🙂
The guy in that truck may have been the only person we saw in this little town.
Without even realizing it, we re-routed our entire route through Kansas to go along the Oregon Trail. Originally we were going to head down to Kansas City and take I-70 across Kansas, stopping in Goodland to camp tonight. It turned out there was a couple of sights we wanted to see that were along I-36 instead.
And so we began our quest to see the world’s biggest ball of twine, a more than 17,000 pound ball of string in what looks like a ghost town, and to see the geographic center of the continental United States, or universe as I prefer to mistakenly call it.
The promised picture of the world’s largest ball of twine, with Cory lending some perspective.
Pictures of the ball of twine will follow, (I forgot to snap a few with my Blackberry) but I did attach a picture of the chapel at the geographic center and of the monument erected there. The third picture you see is the roads we took to get to the monument.
Sheila (the GPS) can’t find anything unless we have a specific street address. (If you want to get down to it, she has trouble finding most things, but don’t tell her I said that. But I digress.) We didn’t have an address for the geographic center, so we had to do it old school with the map. With me driving, Amanda studied the atlas and determined a route. We were to get back on I-36 and then take a couple of state roads to Lebanon, Kans.
It started getting interesting when the the black top ended. According to the map, the roads were paved. I guess concrete covered in gravel can be considered paved. We follow this road that feels like the driveway on someone’s farm and I start having flashbacks of when I went to monument Rocks near Garden City, Kans. when I was a teenager. Except that time we turned off on a dirt road and even the cows watched us drive by with looks of warning on their sad cow faces.
Just when we gave up all hope of ever getting to a paved road again, we saw the road change from the bright white of the concrete to the dull black of pavement in the distance. We ended up right in Lebanon, a couple of miles from the geographic center.
The geographic center of the United States
After we finished at the center, we drove through Lebanon looking for one of the souvenir shops a sign at the monument promised. We didn’t find anything. And by anything, I mean not a soul. Or an open shop. I shot a short, quick video of the “business district” of Lebanon that I’ll post tomorrow when I get some Wi-Fi. We are two for two in abandoned towns today; Cawker City, home of the ball of twine, looked abandoned as well. Those pictures will be posted tomorrow as well.
Now we’re on our way to a camp site in Colorado. Hopefully we’ll pass another Wal-mart sometime soon, because my camera has chosen the most inopportune moment to give up the ghost.
After a few hours of sleep, I’m ready to talk some more about the first day of our trip. Between the musty smell of the room and lack of sleep, I left out a few tales from the road when I posted last night.
Tale number uno: No room at the Days Inn.
We got to the hotel around midnight, only to find that there were no rooms available. Fortunately we didn’t have to make our beds in a barn, an Econolodge a few miles away still had eight rooms available.
Who knew Hannibal, Mo. Was such a hoppin’ place?
The moral of this story is not to accept from online reservations that there are still rooms available, and make your reservations in advance. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have ended up in a musty room with only one working light. But to give the Econolodge credit, the room looked pretty clean, the staff was friendly and the hot breakfast wasn’t bad at all. And as soon as I post this, I’m contacting our campgrounds for the next couple of nights and making reservations.
Tale number dos: Lynnville, Ind.
This is the diner in Lynnville, Ind., that saved us all from starvation on Day 1 of the trip.
It was dinner time yesterday evening and none of had eaten anything since the morning, therefore we were starved. Restaurants were few and far between on I-64 in the Middle of Nowhere, Indiana, and the few snacks we had with us weren’t holding us over anymore. Before we got to the point where we all started visualizing each other as our next meals, we stopped in Lynnville. The only thing we could find open was a teeny hole-in-the-wall diner that doubled as the town’s Blockbuster Video. I think the best (read: most entertaining) thing about this diner was that just about everyone who came in ordered a half a case of beer at the counter, cracked one open immediately, and then took the opened beer and case to their table. (When I make it to Wi-Fi again, I’ll post a picture of the diner. 🙂
Tale number tres: Meet Sailor Moon.
Waaaay back in the summer Amanda and I discussed what we should name the rental car. We tossed around several different ideas, bit none of them fit this car. We ended up with an electric blue Corolla carrying Georgia plates. The first step to naming the baby was determining its gender. We couldn’t decide. Cory thought it was a girl, Amanda thought it was a boy. So, we determined he (she?) is a tranny. He (she?) is going to be really excited when we make it to San Francisco.
It only makes sense that a transvestite Japanese Georgia peach would have an anime name. We took votes through Amanda’s blog and Facebook to decide her (his?) name and when the polls closed last night, Sailor Moon won. The only complaint I have about him (her?) is his (her?) speakers are blown. We can only listen to moderately loud music on the road.
So far today we have seen Mark Twain’s boyhood home (pictures to follow!) With the help of Sailor Moon and Sheila, we’re on our way to see the biggest ball of twine.
I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of our fully-loaded car. (Look closely and you’ll see Amanda in the back of one of these pictures!
We finally made it to Hannibal, Mo. for our first stop of the trip. We actually made it on the road by 2 p.m. as planned but traffic at some inopportune moments kept holding us back. Everything was going well until we were about 30 minutes from Cohokia Mounds State Historic Site — about 30 minutes from sunset when the park closed. Traffic came to a dead stop and Cory realized we must have hit traffic from an accident he heard some locals talking about at a gas station.
We couldn’t begin our journey without stopping in Louisville to walk along the waterfront – and of course stop for some pictures!
In a desperate attempt to avoid the traffic and make it to the Mounds before dark, we exited off the Interstate and followed a line of cars doing the same thing. Of course, that was when Sheila, the GPS, decided to become useless. Apparently a U-turn was the only solution she could think of. So while Shelia kept yelling at us to turn around, Amanda and I figured out what road we ended up on, used the sun to determine what direction we were headed on said road and then found our own alternate route. Eventually, Sheila caught up with us, but by that time we already knew where we were going. (Thanks, Mom, for letting us take your atlas with us!)
We made it to Cohokia Mounds right at dusk. The mounds was the largest Native American city north of Mexico and was inhabited until the 1400s, according to its website. Monk’s Mound, the largest man-made mound in North America, was the only formation we were able to see before the darkness and mosquitoes chased us away. The mound stands 10 stories high, and climbing the stairs rewards you with breath-taking views of the surrounding mounds and even St. Louis in the distance.
But now, I really need to crash! We have a long drive through Kansas tomorrow.
I am so over rental car companies. We’re down to about 42 hours until our scheduled departure time, and I’ve been trying to confirm reservations and make sure all the loose ends are tied up so we don’t have any major surprises on the trip.
So everything is going well until I call the rental car company. First, the fees they tack on for additional drivers and age restrictions is simply ludicrous, to borrow my Aunt Amy’s phrase. As I should have expected, the price that was quoted to me when I made the reservation was missing some rather substantial fees. Think charges to the tune of $40-$60 a day for 12 days. You do the math. I’m a journalism major. All I know is that is NOT in the budget.
And to further complicate matters, there can only be one driver under 25 per rental. And my travel partners are both 21.
It came down to us losing one of our drivers, but all the fees for additional drivers and under 25 drivers are being waived. Now, Josh at Hertz doesn’t know I know that if one has a AAA membership the additional driver fees get waived anyway, and that Hertz has an additional special currently running where drivers under 25 get their fees waived. I’ll just let him keep thinking he’s my new BFF and be happy we’re not out any more money on the rental. 🙂
Oh, where to begin. If you’re following Amanda’s blog, you already know that I was able to squeeze one more day off (actually, just half a day, but I’ll take it!) from work and we’re now leaving Friday instead of Saturday. (Four more days!!) This is giving us the chance to stop and see Cahokia Mounds in Illinois and pause to honor Mark Twain in Hannibal, Mo.
You will also know that my baby brother, Cory, is also joining us on the trip. And by “baby” I mean “21 year old who has been able to kick my butt for the last 10 years.” Good thing for me he doesn’t hit girls!
While adding a boy does take some of the crazy out of the trip — its no longer two twenty-something women tackling the open road — I’m genuinely excited that Cory is coming along. I’m not so excited about the three-and-a-half foot machete, with a dual knife and saw-blade, he has decided to bring with us. At least it will come in handy if we need to chop down a tree and build our own shelter.
But what you haven’t learned from Amanda’s blog is that we might finally be finished actually planning the trip. Maybe.
When we started planning our Gypsy Trip, part of the plan was to not plan everything. No itineraries. No check in times. We’d go until we stopped and then find a place to stay. In theory, it sounds like the making of an amazing adventure. But in reality, there’s always the nerd who has to have the maps and plans and calculate the time it takes to get between places and make lists of campgrounds, hotels and hostels so we’ll know where to go to sleep once we get somewhere. That nerd is me.
I can’t even tell you how many hours I’ve spent this summer researching places to stay or how many hours I’ve spent in just the last week putting together a trip route. Everyday I’ve found something new to obsess over. We only have 12 days to get through 18 states and countless sites to see. Its impossible to do that without a plan.
And so, I will share with you know the fruits of my labor. Below is a map of the route we will be taking, complete with push pins to designate each spot we plan to stop. We may not follow this plan, but at least we’ll have a reference point and know what’s around to sleep in!
I’m sure you’ve seen, or at least heard of, “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” You know, the movie where Chevy Chase loads up the family in their station wagon and shenanigans ensue while they’re on a great American adventure. Well, that just happens to be one of my dad’s favorite movies.
When I was growing up I was lucky enough to take many family roadtrips, three or four of them out west. When I say “lucky” I’m not being sarcastic. Sure, when I was a teenager I wasn’t thrilled about being cooped up in a vehicle for a 12-hour drive, but at least I had the entire third-row seat of an SUV to myself.
Looking back, the times when I was most miserable were some of the best memories I have. Like the year we started out with the intent of staying in Colorado Springs for a week, but instead decided to drive north through Wyoming, checking out Mt. Rushmore and Wall, South Dakota on the way home. Or the time we visited Tombstone, Arizona and got enough Wyatt Earp trivia to last a lifetime.
Hold it. Who am I and when did I get so old and nostalgic?
I dug out some of my favorite photos from those trips and posted them below. Unfortunately, I haven’t posted anything from my first trip out west to the Grand Canyon. I shot everything with a 35mm SLR that year and I haven’t converted them to digital yet.
Feel free to post your favorite Griswold-style family vacation memories in the comments! I’d love to read them. Enjoy! 🙂
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| Â I love this accidental shot through the clouds going up Mt. Evans. |
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| Cathedral Rock |
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| The boys were nice enough to hold their fire until I got this shot. |
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| Oh, yeah. That wasn’t even the half of what we did in that Jeep. |
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| One of my favorite scenic shots from Rocky Mountain National Park. |
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| My all-time favorite desert shot, taken in Saguaro National Forest. |
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| These sandstone formations were in the middle of a cow pasture somewhere in Kansas. |
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| Yes. That is a skeleton wearing a cowboy hat driving that car. |
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| The road going up Pike’s Peak |
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| Yes. The Big Nose Kate’s Saloon. |
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| Ascending Mt. Evans |
In keeping with the spirit of roadtrips I wanted to share with you some of the websites I’ve come across in my online meanderings while preparing for this trip. I haven’t found anyone else who has camped their way across the country though. Pansies. 🙂
breathlessadventurer.com 