Cross This! (T-Minus 18 Months)

Sixth post in this prelude to the big trip; we’re up to Spring of 2012, and the planning begins.

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Say you’ve always wanted to cross this. I mean drive across it. A road trip across this great country. Deliberately, with a plan to see things you’ve always wanted to see, and maybe some things you did not know you wanted to see. And you wanted to hear the accents and drink the coffee and ask for brochures and maps. And maybe you’d camp in some places, get a hotel in others, and maybe see a show in New York or a baseball game in Boston. How would you do it?

In our case the first step in bringing a dream out of the clouds is to commit a first draft plan to a napkin. The frail paper on a cafe table, a pen and a couple cups of coffee are all we need to start on a path to the realization of our dream. We make the pen strokes tentative to preserve the flimsy paper from tearing. That’s OK, we’re just supposing here.

We have a tradition of napkin plans over the years with schools, credentials, houses, careers, marriage. And for crossing the country by car a napkin was our first route map, recalling maps I marked up as a kid, now giving me more confidence that this could happen. I have a sabbatical from work coming up in 18 months. Yes, this can happen. Destinations as dots, routes as straight-line connectors–yes this can happen!!!

Historic document! Ancient map in the original napkin!

So… let’s see … Across the north early in the Fall, back home across the south as the season cools.  We want to see the Fall colors in New England, but what to see on the way there?  I’ve always wanted to see the town my ancestor founded–Mount Pleasant, IA, but we don’t want to just do Interstates on the way there (see earlier post on Interstate highways).  So we will wind our way to favorites like Yellowstone/Tetons and the Black Hills.  Then Lincoln country, Niagara and upstate New York.

We will greet the Atlantic at Acadia National Park in Maine. From there we will angle Southwest across the big cities of the East. We had earlier projected visits to the Outer Banks and New Orleans, now dropped from the route, then to the Ozarks and home across the Southwest.

We swag some numbers of the days between each destination, and the days we’d stay in some places. We do not want to drive every day, in fact we want to drive only half the days. First guess is a 47 day trip. Pretty close to the final plan.

Creative gift from daughter Amy, to show pictures of Kirk Creek and Acadia, and to preserve some sand, pebbles, shells and water from each shore.

But is this really going to be coast-to-coast? Touch the Pacific, touch the Atlantic? That was my dream as a kid (see first post), so it simply has to be. We live near Sacramento, almost but not quite the west coast. Starting from home is almost a cheater’s head start.  So should we back up to the true starting line at the coast? For the symbolism of it, and the bragging rights, it’s worth it to run out to the Pacific first, on a short pre-trip, and touch the waves there.

Salt Point State Park north of Bodega Bay could have been a good Pacific Coast Mile Zero.

Any of our prior weekend trips to the coast could qualify, like the one earlier in 2013 to Salt Point State Park north of Bodega Bay. Yet there are plans for a family reunion on the central coast on a weekend closer to the big trip, so let’s use that. We will camp at Kirk Creek near Big Sur and some of the kids with us.  On July 31 when we drive back home, we will mark that day’s beginning as Mile Zero. When the road trip resumes on September 2, leaving on the main trip from our home, it will actually be a sort of “day 2” in the coast-to-coast adventure.

They say half the fun of a trip is planning it.  The fun of that half, then, started with a crude dot-and-line drawing that resembled more the outline of a goldfish cracker than a real map.  More accurate maps will be needed, yes, but they will not have half the whimsy and imagination of the coffee shop cartography that first made us believe the trip could really happen.

Pop-Ups Are the Golden Mean of Road-Trip Camping (2009, T-Minus 4 years)

Post five, 2009, and we buy a pop-up.  At that point we are four years from this Fall’s cross-country road trip.  As I write these prelude posts, we will eventually catch up to present time and this blog will become the record of the trip itself, starting Sept 2.

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The pop-up or tent trailer is the sweet spot, the golden mean, the glorious compromise.

That ascribes more virtues than might be deserved for what is, after all, simply a kind of recreational vehicle.  We bought ours in 2009, the Coleman Cheyenne that will become our residence for 36 of the 49 days on the cross-country road trip.

For us, it is a graduation to a kind of vacation mobility yet while retaining a sense that we’re still living in the outdoors.  It strikes a balance I want to describe for you.

First of all, a pop-up tent trailer is still like camping just to look at it.  Though an RV, it has an air of camping simplicity and utility whether closed or open.  On the road it’s light to pull and aerodynamic, a box on wheels that will be set up on arrival.  Unlike full RV’s,you don’t just park it and walk in–you still get to “make camp” in a way, yet without tent poles and ground tarps.  All the fun fuss and clamor of claiming a site, getting level ground, raising the tent, and hearing the wind against the canvas walls of your shelter are elements of camping that are retained with a pop-up.

Snow in camp, Madison Campground, Yellowstone National Park, 2010

When open you see that it is clever, like a big camper’s gadget–it’s the Swiss Army knife of RV’s.  Darwin might come to mind as the whole thing grows cloth sides with windows.  Beds mutate to the fore and aft.  Or someone might think of a Transformer toy as the box lid becomes a roof to our living room and kitchen, and then a piece which was nested in the ceiling swings down to become our front door.

The perfect middle-ground has been found between camping and RV life.  We rented a huge RV once, and we were too aware of it as a drivable apartment complete with sewage hold.  I came to loathe dark blue water.  This pop-up, however, has us off the ground on a comfortable bed, and provides a camp kitchen readily (sooner than ground camping set-ups), with refrigerator, hot water heater, sink, heater, dinette, interior lighting and beds for 7.  And we’re able to break camp in 45 minutes to drive to the next spot.

We have had four years of practice with the pop-up.  The many weekend trips have been great, but the multi-stop two-week itineraries, one to Yellowstone in 2010 and another to Rainier / Vancouver Island in 2012, have given us the best predictions of the extended life on the road that awaits us in September of 2013.

Front door view, Stanley Lake, 2010

On the way to Yellowstone, we gerrymander our trailer in opposite direction to the campsite design at Stanley Lake, ID (2010).  That is so our door faces the peaks of the Sawtooth Range.  That part of the camp, and that view, were gloriously unpopulated.  We unhook the car, lock the trailer, and tour the area… returning and retiring that night we enjoy a thunderstorm which pounds the camp with lightning strikes so close the sound does not delay after the flash.  Water gets in my tool box.  The next night we are still and appreciative of the fire in the ring while a fox dares to traverse our site.

Geyser Basin, Yellowstone, 2010

Hook up another day, and we pull through Craters of the Moon monument and on to Yellowstone and the Tetons.  Here is where Madison Campground provides a good base, even a morning of snow, and a ranger program in the dusk; a following day of meeting old friends at Mammoth Hot Springs, viewing Yellowstone Falls, Old Faithful, and returning to our evening fire.

Grand Teton park is a lesson in planning ahead.  With no reservations at Jackson Lake, we settle for the Jackson Hole KOA.  A bland spot to camp, but we were not there enough to care too much, as we unhitch and tour the park.

High Tea, Empress Hotel, Victoria BC

Two years later we enjoy Rainier, the Olympics and Vancouver Island.  The trip is a mix of wooded campsites, a visit with friends (Goymeracs, camping at Rainier) and family (Jeff and Dave in Auburn, WA), a ferry ride with the trailer in tow, and hikes in the rainforest.  Like the pop-up as the golden mean between RV and tenting, these vacations are also a wonderful mix, not merely a “mean” as in “average,” but a variety available to us because of an agile road trip style — “high tea” at the Fairmont Empress in Victoria one day, hiking in a rainforest the next.

It doesn’t get more “golden mean” than that!

High Tea? Yes, the day before. Now we are in camp, Hoh rain forest. WA 2012

Tablecloth Blog (T minus 17 years)

Fourth post, some more prelude and pre-history to this Fall’s road trip across the US.

Virtuality, the cloud and email be damned.  I want to write on a tablecloth.

If road trips, camping and friends around a campfire are rebelliously old-school, then the record of these things ought to be similarly analogue; not dependent for upload where you can get WiFi and a caramel macchiato, but scrawled like a child with a new box of colors.

How about on the tablecloth?  Right on the tablecloth with a Sharpie.  No, junior, not the one at home, but on a tablecloth for camping trips.  Take the same cloth each time you go, and be sure to pack the pens.  Invite people to your site and have them sign, too.  As the years pass, and some colors bleed or fade a little, the cloth becomes its own tableau, presenting the movement of time, of successive places and years, yet on a thing that is motionless, like an open graphic diary.

Since the first cloth-post in 1996 we have sharpied our presence in scores of geographies, asked friends and family to sign, outlined the paw prints of overnight tabletop visitors, drawn pictures of trees, bridges, ridges and even our mosquito zappers.  And the places are always mentioned, and the dates of each.

It’s our own low-tech time machine and teleportation device.  The cloth was there, then — see the signature? — but it’s here, now, receiving the marks of the present time.  We have moved something of another place to here, and another time to now.

Patrick’s Point (our second time there) 1996.  Stumpy Meadows 1997.  Big Sur 1998.  San Simeon 2001.  Almanor 2009.  June Lake 2011.  Portola Redwoods 2012.

We recall people now gone (My Uncle Dick wrote “Big Daddy Was Here,” Shasta in 1998, and he further wrote large, with a flourish of family pride “Stevens Uber Alle”).  Hikes (Mammoth, 2001, “our feet are tired but we love it!”), bike rides (over the Golden Gate, 2011).  We note eucalyptus at Chabot, Redwoods at Portola, and rain forests at Hoh.

It signifies one more thing.  There’s just something about a table, a symbol of fellowship, in Scripture a sacrament of acceptance, unity and eternity.  The gnarly and dusty plank-boards of a mean and lowly campsite table, painted russet in a rush by a junior ranger last summer, comes under the shroud of our history, holding flat the story of how we got here.  For this moment and  this place it is our living room and our link to our past and future.

Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, WA, 2012

Roads Less Traveled 1989 – 2003; T-minus 24 to 10 years and counting

Continuing the prequel posts.  We move 15 years closer to the September 2013 cross-US road trip to recall traveling with small children on small roads.   Earlier pre-history posts cover how the dream began, a 70’s VW van trip, and the links above give more background and the 9/2013 trip plan.

Does anyone really like the interstate?  They are a tolerable utility, useful when you simply need to get there.  And as such they may provide some charm.  I have a romantic attachment to a memory of I-15 from Barstow to Las Vegas at 2 am with Procol Harum on the radio.  But mostly these asphalt tributes to Ike are like the dues you must pay to get to the good stuff.  The I-70’s that provide places like Vail right at the offramp are rare.  More often we abuse the practical fourlanes and then leave them to see Tahoe or Glacier or Zion or the smaller roads of the Eastern Sierra.

1989 hotel stay at Circus Circus, Las Vegas. This trip mixed hotels, camping and staying with friends/family.

In 1989 we took our first big road trip with 3 kids along.  At the same time I started to enjoy planning trips that minimize Interstates.  I mean, why drive to Northern California from Phoenix using I-10 and I-5?  Yeesh.  With a little more time and imagination you can drive on top of Hoover Dam, see the Vegas Strip, look for aliens in the Nevada desert, and enter California over the White Mountains with practically no one in sight.  The Sierras loom across the Owens Valley as you drop to US395, visit Mammoth, and starve your carburetor  over Tioga to Yosemite.

The interstates would have saved me two days and given me wonderful lunches at Denny’s Restaurants (*earp*), but would have cost us seeing Hot Creek, Twin Lakes, Devil’s Postpile and all the rest.  State highways and the old US routes rule in 1989, all the way to Napa, Patrick’s Point, Shasta, and across the west (US 50, the “loneliest road”) to Aspen, and south again to Phoenix.

2000 in DC, a faux cross-country road-trip, cheating by airplane to Baltimore and a rental car for 16 days.

Other trips gave us wandering Summers.  Some faux cross-country driving trips were included, and by that I mean we flew to a destination, rented a car and cut a path from there.  2000 was such a year, with a loop to DC, Williamsburg, Monticello, Gettysburg, Cooperstown, Boston, Martha’s Vineyard and New York City.  Airplanes and hotels might partially disqualify the trip as a cross-country prelude, but it was still a fun route.

Amy at South Rim, 2003.

Another such trip involved an airplane to Spokane and a rental car up to Banff.  In 2003 we cut a route from Sacramento to Bridgeport to Las Vegas to South Rim to Santa Fe to Monument Valley to North Rim to Bryce to Great Basin National Park and back home to Sactown.  I’ll admit to a little bit of I-40 and I-25 on that trip, which are not bad, but the smaller roads hold the best joys.

In all these years, on all these trips, our great kids have been wonderful travelers, and now they independently enjoy some measure of wanderlust.  If we had any part in their appreciation for travel, it might be that we saw something more than onramps and truck stops.  Maybe it’s the idea that the journey is not a means to an end, but is a joy in its own right.

Patrick’s Point, in 1989 our furthest stop from our then-home Phoenix, is remembered well by our kids, and each wants to return, or has already.  I wonder if the happiness of Patrick’s Point isn’t amplified because we took a long time to get there, and went on plenty of wonderfully convoluted route choices along the way.

2003; Road Trip destination Santa Fe for some family time, brothers Cal, Greg, Jeff

Some pictures capture the kids on their way somewhere, which is as it should be (as long as we could keep an eye on them, of course). 1989 on the walkway to the tidepools at Patrick’s Point

Colorado with John and Tessa

South Rim, Grand Canyon, 2003

T-Minus 39 Years (1974 Canada VW Van Roadtrip)

This post continues a kind of pre-history countdown to our cross-country road trip, set to start Sept 2, 2013.  The first post, T-minus 50 years, tells of my first affection for the idea as a kid, and subsequent posts will note mileposts until we reach present time.  We’ll then blog into and through the trip as it happens.  (See pages about the dream and the trip details, linked above).  This post moves closer, to the first big shared road trip for us as newlywed road warriors.

Road trips are awesome.  And even more so if you are married to someone who also loves to see life at 65 mph on a road in another place, maybe to watch the sun drop behind a westerly range, and then to scope out a great campsite, hear the quiet, see the Milky Way, and get into your zip-together sleeping bags.

Nancy and I both grew up with road trips and camping.  We even honeymooned with a road trip (a ski trip, not camping) from So Cal to Tahoe.  The first big summertime trip, the kind that takes us camp to camp, state to state–the kind with a carload of stuff, a mug full of coffee, and a pre-Pandora-days spin-the-radio-tuning-dial in search of good music–that for us was June 1974.

With a borrowed VW van (thanks, Terry Lindvall), we barrel our way through Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, barely make it over a ridge to Bear Lake, on to the Tetons, Yellowstone, Banff, Jasper, Seattle and home to Costa Mesa.  A lot for two weeks.

We love to see stuff:  Little cafes, campgrounds, brown signs and visitorcenters.  National Park movies, trails, huge thunderheads that Californians never see, ranger talks, state borders, gigantic skies. It’s just that it’s different, it’s not here.  It’s there, somewhere we have not been before.

Other trips would intervene in the following 39 years; none was yet coast-to-coast, but each provided a foretaste.  We had plenty of backpacking adventures, even a couple overseas trips and 3 cruises.  And we had a couple careers and three kids (who also grew to appreciate travel adventures of different sorts).  But the cross-country by car adventure would wait until 2013.

Enjoy some other pics from the 74 trip:

  

T minus 50 Years

My Dad and I squinted ahead to Highway 6 before us. The rest of the family asleep, I was alert as a co-pilot should be, a map spread over my knees. The route held no options, no chance of being lost–just keep going on route 6–but I was needed, if for no other reason than to inform Dad that we were in the Ralston Valley and the range ahead of us was the Monitor.

Our Aristocrat Land-Liner. Self-contained! Gave us great memories, and overheated the car. Here brother Jeff cooly guards the door.

It was simple, unremarkable, low-tech by today’s standards: A station wagon pulling a trailer, a baking black asphalt line, center-striped with a dashed line of paint, ruler straight to the next range across the Great Basin in Nevada, disappearing over Saulsbury Summit, elevation 6522. Yet this was new to me, it was not what I saw yesterday, and not what I would see tomorrow, nor even what I would see that evening when we pulled into Ward Mtn Campground near Ely and trade the valley scrub for an outcropping of piñon pine on a mid-desert ridge.

I realize that I behaved then, and still do now, like I just time-traveled from an era when people hardly saw anything different. It was not that long ago that most people stayed within 50 miles of their homes over their entire lifetimes. As much as we traveled, you’d think I would get used to it by now, but I still regard each turn as providing something new to see. And I’m still impressed that we can actually go there to see it in just hours or days.

This is the background to a love of maps, camping and travel in general. It was during these years that I would mark up US maps with proposed routes across the US. We lived in Southern California, in Hermosa Beach, and I wanted to go across to other beaches, at the other end of US geography and history. I am not sure how many maps I marked, probably fewer than my memory glorifies about the time, but each showed a wavy, wide and crude mark to just, well, see stuff.

Age 11, peering from the shower, posing with the rest of the family. L to R Dad, Greg, Jeff, me, Mom.

To live in LA is to view the Pacific Ocean as a beauty and a chance to play.  In terms of directions, it is also a westward hard-stop that heightened my interest in the other directions. When I interpret this symbolically, with more analysis than I ever considered at the time, I think about how the flow of US history was ever westward. Perhaps I wanted to understand how we got here, to examine the flow, to marvel that a soldier stood in this spot or an explorer crested a ridge at another. And somehow all those pasts combined in a flow that included me, who now sat in my house, walked to school, lived my life.

Travel can be a history lesson and a re-assessment of direction. For a west coast boy of European extraction, understanding how we got here is a matter of north, east and south. (Acknowledging that I am looking at just a few of several valid directional histories; that there are those who came from the Orient, including native Americans).  These are trails I have always wanted to savor on the ground. And then on the return from the Atlantic, perhaps symbolically, we will have a chance to appreciate the movement of history by re-tracing west again.

Probably my first big road trip at age 7, here with big brother Greg in Grand Teton National Park.