November
26 Salt Lake City, UT
27 Colorado Springs, CO
28-30 Manhattan, KS
December
1 Kansas City, MO
2-4 Chicago, IL
5 Pittsburgh, PA
6-8 New York, NY
9-10 Washington D.C.
11 Ashville, NC
12-13 Nashville, TN
14 Memphis, TN
15-16 New Orleans, LA
17 Austin, TX
18-? TBD
The adventure officially began in Idaho Falls on Monday when I piloted my faithful Subaru Outback onto I-15 . As I hit the on-ramp, I glanced down to see the odometer roll-over to exactly 123,000. By the end of January it will read well over 132,000. Fully serviced over the last few days in preparation of the voyage, the Subaru purred as I sped South. I’m looking forward to the Outback serving as an excellent traveling companion. This utilitarian machine has it all: it’s roomy enough to call a bed in a pinch, has all-wheel drive and gets milage that even the Sierra Club’s most zealous member would approve of. My first stop was Salt Lake City.
A quick three hour drive brought to me to the home of Mormons, the Wasatch Mountains and most importantly, my beautiful girlfriend Annie. Annie treated me to an early birthday dinner at Trios, a delicious restaurant near downtown. After visiting my college roommate, Ryan, and his wife, we retired for an early evening and I started to arrange accommodations for Chicago and beyond via Couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.com), a community which I’ll describe fully in another post.
After saying farewell to Annie and getting a tire rotation, I was once again driving South. Headed for Colorado Springs, I would be traveling through Grand Junction and Denver along the way. I’ve always loved southern Utah and stopped to snap a few pictures of the Martian landscape.
I finally arrived in Colorado Springs around 7pm. My first ten hours of driving during my first long leg of the trip brought a few interstate epiphanies:
a) By the time I am done with my travels I will have permanently lost all feeling to my rear-end. For anyone still shopping for me for Christmas I have a solitary request - a donut pillow.
b) You see a lot of country driving ten hours a day and feel guilty about not stopping more to explore. As my ambitious itinerary calls for many such days in the future, I’ll have to absorb the landscape the best as possible from behind the windshield.
In Colorado Springs I stayed with friends from Great Falls, Ryan and Nicole, who work as local news reporters. Oddly enough, my college roommate and wife who I’d seen the prior night in Salt Lake are also Ryan and Nicole. We went out for some excellent burgers before Ryan took me for a evening tour of The Garden of the Gods. The Garden consists of numerous behemoth rock formations jutting dramatically from the earth, but was hard to fully appreciate from their silhouettes against the evening sky. Returning home, we partook in the sacred American male tradition of enjoying a few beers while watching SportsCenter before retiring for the evening.
After bidding farewell to my friends the next morning, I departed amid snow flurries and gray skies head for Manhattan, KS, home of Kansas State University and future Economics Nobel Piece Prize winner, Chris Youderian. My previously expressed guilt at driving too quickly through beautiful country evaporated in Kansas. Western Kansas is, in a word, plain. One of the only visible landmarks were the McDonalds arches that were often the first distinguishable sign of a town. Had I never heard of McDonalds, I would have assumed the ubiquitous arches signaled some sort of community religious center or meeting place; these are the types of thoughts that cross your mind after 300 miles of Western Kansas interstate. I must have had a some residual guilt for blasting through Kansas as I did stop after sunset to capture this shot of the waning prairie light.
In hopes of keeping a somewhat attentive audience (i.e. mother), I’ll wrap up this lengthy entry and save the KSU exploits and adventures for my next post. Saturday? Kansas City. Sunday? Chicago and my first real Couchsurfing experience with an independent film maker named Gabriel. Stay tuned........
