The Road Trip

When Ryan and I were in Argentina, we decided to take a road trip to Valle de la Luna and Talampaya national parks (see photos below). We stayed at a small campground in the desert where the stars took your breath away, and the silence left your ears ringing. One of the highlights of the trip was meeting an older couple camping next door (we'd forgotten a wine opener and they graciously lent us theirs), who were from Sweden. The elderly gentleman happily took us round to the back of their RV where he showed a giant North and South American map, with a dotted line scurrying all around Canada, the US, down through Mexico and Central America, throughout Peru and Brazil and finishing about halfway through Argentina."Yup!" he said, "we saved up our retirement fund to come over here, buy this RV, and travel all around these two continents." You can imagine how interesting it was to talk to those two folks.

On our way home from that trip, as we were driving through the wide open plains of the pampas with the Andes shading the highway, Ryan mentioned how he had always wanted to do a road trip around the United States. All I asked was, "can I come?" and the trip was born. That Christmas I gave Ryan four books: a national park book, a state park book, a scenic drives book, and an off-the-beaten-path book. We started pouring through them, oooing and awwing at the glossy pages with beautiful waterfall scenes or colorful local dishes. There was so much we hadn't seen in this country and we started marking down all the places we wanted to visit on the trip. Soon, we had a list that looked like this:

Yellowstone National Park
Olympic National Park
New York City
The Baseball Hall of Fame
Yosemite National Park
Antelope Canyon
Vanderbilt Mansion
Mount Rushmore
Havasu Creek
The Badlands
Voyageurs National Park
Chigaco
Hamilton Pool
etc. etc. etc.

From there, it was all teamwork. Ryan has the math/numbers mind and with his (in my opinion) super human capabilities, he figured out the approximate expense of the trip, the gas, the food, the lodging, etc. With these calculations we were able to figure out the most critical part of the trip: that is, what we could afford. The reality is you could spend 3.5 months just in California, but Ryan and I don't have that kind of cash, so the trip is going to be a sample platter of places, people, and experiences in rapid fire that we can then choose our favorites to come back to in the future (or live there permanently depending on how far we fall in love).

Then came my part of the team effort - all the details. My six megabyte Excel spreadsheet includes reservation information, park entry fees, distances between places, notes on what to see in cities, and food budgeting. It's the mother-load of all trip itineraries.

So that's how this whole thing came into being. It's been about a year and half in the making, planned meticulously, and dreamed about during so many mundane college classes.

While we wish we could just set forth into the unknown, John Muir style, just going where our feet take us, in the words of Dave Barry:

"Not everybody likes to plan every step of a vacation. Some people would rather just grab a backpack and a sleeping bag, stick out their thumbs and start hitchhiking down the highway, enjoying the fun and adventure of not knowing 'what's around the bend.' Most of these people are dead within hours. So planning is definitely the way to go."

Phew! Dodged a bullet there. ;)

We hope you enjoy reading about our travels, the adventures we encounter, the problems we muddle through, and the chance of a lifetime for Ryan and me and to bond, fight, laugh, cry, and experience some of the most amazing places in the world, right here at home in the U.S.