Friday July 28 – Drove to St. Louis from Clinton. Easy drive at night. Arrived at Aunt Mary Kaye and Uncle Tim’s place. Talked with them a bit and went to sleep on their sofa bed in the basement. Dad was sleeping all over the place. At one point he was laying diagonally on the bed and I had to crumple into a little corner of the bed at the top to sleep. He woke up before I did and then I finally got to sleep uninterrupted.
Saturday July 29 – Woke up and had breakfast at the Mooney’s. Mary Kaye made an awesome egg, sausage, and cheese thing. Then we got going at about 7:15. Stopped at Sinclair to get some gas and then it was on the road. Driving across highway 70 took us across Missouri. We saw a hot air balloon and the terrain slowly was changing. Drove through Kansas City and made it to a rest stop/gas station outside of Topeka, Kansas where we filled up our tank as well as our food tanks by eating at a Hardees. Then we kept driving all the way across Kansas. With trail mix and beef jerky, we sustained ourselves to our next stop; A gas station in the middle of nowhere Kansas that doubled as the Ford dealership. After that stop, driving continued to another stop in flat western Kansas. This was Prairie Dog City. It is a cheesy stop along the highway and it is well worth the price of admission. They had all sorts of fun animals including rattlesnakes, badgers, and even a six legged cow (no joke!) It was just the perfect stop on a weary day of a lot of driving. So finally driving continued all the way through western Kansas and into Eastern flat Colorado. As you drove though, slowly but surely, the peaks of the Front Range slowly poked through the haze. Made it into Denver right when the sun was perfectly in our eyes. That wasn’t fun, especially with all the bugs caked on our windshield from the day of driving. We filled up our tanks one more time in Lyons and then pounded our way up to Estes Park in the twilight of the night. When we arrived in the Estes Valley, the lights were a welcome that anybody weary from 15 hours of traveling would have wanted. We went to the YMCA and I met up with a few people although they ended up being few and far between. Things have changed there and the carryover of people I know is minimal. So I talked to Ross for a bit and then went to bed. My dad and I slept on the very top of the road to Bible Point. It had a slight downhill slope, but it was an excellent place, and it was free.
Sunday July 30 – We woke up and walked around a bit. I got a chance to do some bouldering on the rocks around Bible Point and we went to the top of it. Then we ‘cleaned up’ and went to church at Our Lady of the Mountains in Estes. After a sermon about how important the Eucharist is and how the priest there says mass too long, we went to the Mountain Shop. I saw Morgan Brown there and bought a Nalgene. Oh how I missed having one of those. Then we went and ate at Poppy’s. We chowed down on our specialty pizzas as well as gulped down tons of water and we were ready to go. We decided that we were going to do a hike in the afternoon. Twin Sisters was the hike. It is a 7.6 mile hike with a 2300 foot elevation gain. My dad was challenged. It threatened to thunderstorm and as we approached treeline, I had a caution about me making sure we were gonna be ok. My dad stopped short of the summit because he couldn’t go any more. I rushed up to where I could see over the top. I did not make it to the top because I was still worried about storms, but I still saw a most majestic view. We came down from the hike then and all told, it took about 6 hours. We came back into town, starving, and ate at a restaurant in town called 451’s. It was good stuff and great for our aching bodies. We went back to the Y, I looked for a few people, and then we hauled ourselves to our camping spot from the previous day.
Monday July 31 – I woke up at sunrise abruptly because of bird in my ear. So I ran to a place where I could get a picture of the sun rising up over the mountains. It was glorious. Then I went to go change all my clothes including underwear. I was going to wear the same pair of shorts, but when I tried to step back in the leg hole, I stepped on the pocket my camera was in. CRUNCH went my LCD. I didn’t notice at the time, but I realized it soon later and I was ticked. Luckily I didn’t freak too much, but it did put a small damper on the day. So we went and I got to hang out with my Scrabbit campers/counselors for a bit in the morning. I got to see Jenna and Lindsey. It was great to catch up with the campers. They’ve gotten bigger and wilder it seems. I played around with them a bit, they remembered all sorts of fun things we did together and gullible was still written on the ceiling. I also went over to Bennett to see Lezlie and I ran into Melanie there as well as well as some people from ISU that I knew. I got to join them in song time and I belted my favorite camp song, ALICE! I was running out of breath dancing around all of songtime. Then I went to Jellison to see the ASK group. THEN, back to the Scrabbit Hole for songtime. I sang ALICE! again, and did a non-rhyming sock song verse. Then I had to bid a goodbye to the kids once again and my dad and I rode off into the mountains. Not without getting some food first. We ate at Molly B’s for breakfast and then drove through RMNP and stopped at the crowd infested visitor’s center on Trail Ridge Road. My dad bought a replacement mug for Emily, and then it was off again down the other side. We rode on through to Granby Lake where I stopped at took some pictures with my newly busted, but still functioning, camera. We drove through some different parts of the mountains trying to snake our way back to I-70. Finally we made it and it was a good. On 70 there are many famous ski resorts, and after passing Breckenridge, Vail, and more, I was ready to come back there in the winter. As we drove though, we made it into western Colorado which got more and more desolate. Finally we pushed through to where a sign said, “No services next 59 miles.” At this point, we were in the middle of nowhere. We pounded into Utah and all you could see was desert and maybe the occasional oncoming car. The only exits were for ranches and they didn’t even have their homesteads off of the interstate. Then we took a road called Utah 128 down to Moab. This road starts out in the middle of this nowhere we were in and slowly works itself down into an oasis. We rolled into the Colorado River valley and canyons as well as strange rock formations started to jut up around us. We stopped on a sandy beach, dipped our feet into the Colorado, and then road into Moab. This crazy town exists in the desert in the middle of nowhere, yet it is green. We stopped at their visitor’s center, asked about a few things, including places to shower, and then ate dinner at a place called the Slickrock Café. It was amazingly good, although there was too much food. So we drove back into the canyon that night in the dark and found a spot to camp amongst a grove of tree’s along the edge of the Colorado. How amazing is that? We slept in a canyon along the Colorado River. Soooooo cool. My tent made its first appearance this night as I was desperate to set up my new toy. I did so, and it was great. I also set up the tent because I saw some lightning basically all around us. My dad was very insistent on using his massive 40X20 foot tarp as we had been the previous two nights, but that thing wasn’t going to protect him very well from the storms that night. So he piled into my tent when it started to rain and we laid there dealing with about 4/10 of an inch of rain.
Tuesday August 1 – After a rocky night of sleep for me and a great night for him, we got awoke and broke camp. There was a massive bug there on the picnic table by our site that was dead. This thing was HUGE! So my dad picked it up so I could take a picture for scale purposes. After taking forever to shove that massive waste of space tarp into the trunk, we filled our tank in Moab and rolled over to Arches National Park. We drove around there all morning and checked our everywhere the main road goes. We walked to a few arches on short trails and then continued on. The structures here are very much you must see them to believe them. It is an utterly strange world. We went into town and ate lunch at a chain that we don’t have in the Midwest and then prepared for a hike in the park. We grabbed some water, as we would be walking through the desert and drove up to the Devil’s Garden. There we hiked to more arches, including the amazingly delicate Landscape Arch that spans 306 feet. Then we continued to hike, at one point walking across a ‘fin’ way in the sky. Utterly amazing! After our hike ended, we drove out of the park. I however saw a dirt road that I thought would take us to the highway we needed to be in a short distance after exiting the park. Well it wasn’t exactly a short distance. There we were, driving into a gorgeous sunset with rock formations on the hill in front of us looking like a city on a hill in Biblical times. It was awesome. We rolled on this dirt and gravel road well out of the park and well away from anything resembling civilization. We were started to get worried and my dad was very visibly so. I finally saw a tower in the distance and we made our way to this natural gas mine in the middle of nowhere. We stopped and asked the people there how to get back to highway 191. We ended up only being about 3.5 miles from the road. Elated, we drove on and ended up on 191 very close to I-70, which was a huge surprise. We drove on then through the night. Making our way through some dark canyons at night as well as some spectacularly desolate open areas where the only lights were those of traffic. We stopped and fueled up in Price, Utah at a Conoco and then a bit later in the town for some Taco Bell. Finally in Provo, Utah, we made it to a KOA campground after refusing to stay in any hotel. We wanted to rough it gol darn it! I threw down my tent again and my dad slept on his tarp. This night the tent wasn’t necessary, but it was a nice comfort for the night.
Wednesday August 2 – We woke up and this particular campground had shower facilities. My dad and I showered for the first time after four days without showers. We left from Provo and headed for Salt Lake City on one of the most eventful days of our journey. We drove over to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake and decided to get out. After parking on North Temple Street and seeing a sign that said NO. TEMPLE, we almost left because I thought it meant no temple parking. But we kept pressing on and walked into the temple square. There we were offered a free tour of the temple square with evangelism and scrapes of history/architecture. They give you cute girls excited about the Mormon faith for the tour. They told you the gospel, but they leave out their strange beliefs. After being shown around their very clean visitor’s centers and their chapel and hearing about how the Book of Mormon is real, we left temple square and moved on. We left towards Great Salt Lake, drove up to it, smelled the intense smells of an inland sea, and we drove on. After driving up north, we went through Logan, Utah on our way to Preston, Idaho! Preston is the home of the movie Napoleon Dynamite. After asking about the amount of people that flowed through town (about 30 per day), we got gas. We went to the chamber of commerce, bought a map of the locations of the things in Napoleon’s Preston, and drove around town. After getting pictures of a few places, we ate at an Arctic Circle. There they served us chicken and fish and the restaurant didn’t even have ketchup from their main condiment pumps. They had this white sauce, which wasn’t ranch or mayonnaise, and some fry sauce. Then we drove back to the interstate via Idaho state highways. We drove through sections of open range and actually had to slow down on the road a few times for cattle. Finally, arriving back on the interstate, we drove through southern Idaho. Driving on interstate 84 a long way, we arrived in Boise, Idaho where we stopped for gas, dinner at a Jack In The Box, and to check out the famous blue turf of the Boise State football field. It was INCREDIBLE!!! We decided to keep on driving and didn’t even spend the night in Idaho and we rolled on towards Oregon. In Oregon we stayed in a small town called Baker. There we stayed in our last campground underneath the stars on our tarp. The evening was significantly cold.
Thursday August 3 – We awoke ourselves at 5:30 in the morning in the Pacific Time Zone we were in. Then we decided to drive on and keep on driving on further than we needed to, as we drove first to Portland and then Seattle, instead of driving straight to Seattle. Before Portland, we ran into Multnomah Falls, which is a 500+ foot waterfall. There in the tourist inundated area, we walked up and got some cool pictures of the impressive structure. We then drove into Portland and dropped off the cargo that we were carrying to Hubert and his mother’s house. She is a most precious woman and we were very impressed by her hospitality. She took care of us, and then we took care of the rest of our trip. After driving by Reed College, the school of Donald Miller, we drove out of Portland onto the last page of our map…western Washington. There we drove up to Mt. St. Helens. This impressive mountain is still volcanically active after its May 18, 1980 explosion. We drove up to see the desolation that was the crater on top of a windy ridge. As we left the National Monument, we took another somewhat backroad. This one was at least paved, but it was still a fun ridiculous ride with no oncoming traffic for like 15 miles. Then we drove back and up towards the city of Seattle slowly but surely on highways parallel to the interstate and then we arrived in the Seattle-Tacoma area after dark. We had to fly on the interstate to the airport and I got a chance to bust out city driving skills. When we arrived at the airport before my mother and sister and that meant waiting around at where else, a Starbucks…After thinking I lost the car keys, but just leaving them in the ignition and my sister forgetting to bring her birth certificate, we arrived at the hotel in downtown Seattle and were ready to go to sleep…after we parked the car. Which took us around downtown Seattle as my dad and I somehow managed to lose our bearings. Finally sleep came on floor 30 of our hotel.
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