Epic Road Trip ~ Colorado

Front Range in morning light

 

It’s 11:32pm when Colorado finally rolls under the wheels, supplanting stubborn Kansas. Except, it’s really 10:32pm, because it’s now Mountain Time. We’ve been up for 17 hours, driving almost non-stop for 15 straight, and still have a long way to go.

 

Dash Cam

 

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Epic Road Trip ~ Kansas

 Kansas

 

Leaving the city of Kansas, which is in Missouri, lands us in the state of Kansas, which is not in Missouri. The weather improves immediately, as though meteorology obeys cartography, which follows geology, or at least topology, which all actually makes sense. The sky becomes blue again, and thus begins one of the longest and strangest passages of the whole trip.

 


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Epic Road Trip ~ St. Louis & Missouri

 

 

 

 

With access to the hotel wifi, it’s now possible to do things like post to the blog and, oh right, check the weather, which reveals a new front moving up from the South in a big arc, carrying sleet and freezing rain. The forecast puts it shy of the due west highway by morning, like a wave approaching the shore, but just. If we leave early enough we can scoot past before it arrives. However, it effectively eliminates the optional Southern Route kept open as an escape hatch if the weather out west looks bad. Westward ho it is.

It starts snowing again at 2am (3am by my Virginia body clock). I know it is snowing because I’m still awake with road jitters. The forecast is apparently wrong. It snows all night. Day 2 begins after only three hours of sleep.

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Epic Road Trip ~ Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois

Welcome to Kentucky 

 

Across the Big Sandy, Kentucky greets us with an oil refinery. It’s a Dante-esque scene, with flames blazing from pipes that pierce the skyline, steam and smoke everywhere. An orange backdrop of the setting sun compounds the effect. Storage tanks up on the hill are blithely painted with a big “Welcome to” sign, which is bracketed with corporate logos of the refinery. But the human engineered landscape dissipates quickly. Kentucky assumes a fine bucolic appearance of gently rolling hills and forests for what’s left of the rest of the day.

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Epic Road Trip ~ Virginia & West Virginia

Packed 

 

We’re running out of room.

Right.

You can only take one small bag.

Right.

No, really.

I’ve got a small carry on. And a backpack. It can sit under my feet.

Cool. My kayak paddle will be by your head.

Yup, got it.

 

With the car packed (really packed) idling and pointed west, and we strapped in, the driveway suddenly feels like a runway. We pause a moment to contemplate it. Mentally go through a preflight checklist. Contemplate the leaving part.

The road starts out uphill and twisty. First, wending out of our rural hill country, up the Southwest Mountains and Poe’s Ragged Mountains. Beyond that up the Blue Ridge, across the Appalachian Trail and Skyline Drive, down the Shenandoah Valley, then up into the Alleghenies, which encompass almost the entire state of West Virginia. From there it’s a rolling downhill slide to the belly of the country, and then days of flatlands.

 

 

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Epic Cross Country Road Trip

 Cross Country Route #1 ~ the most direct

 

So, on Wednesday morning, Emily and I will pile into her aging over-stuffed Subaru wagon here in Scottsville, Virginia. We’ll point it west and begin driving. After at least four days, over 3000 miles, passing through 14 to 16 US states (depending on where we stop for lunch), we’ll arrive on the west coast. She’s moving to Hood River, Oregon, and I talked her into letting me come along for the ride.

Yes, I know, it’s the middle of winter. Currently, there’s a blizzard sweeping across the Midwest, with temperatures plunging lower than most of the country has seen in 20 years.

We may have to go around. Those figures quoted above? That’s if we take the most direct route, which we’ll call Provisional Route #1. We could end up taking a tour of the Southwest along the way. Hey, it’s 70 degrees in Arizona right now, while by morning it will be -12 degrees (Fahrenheit) in Nebraska. Hmmm, which one is better . . .

I’ll be posting photos from the road as we go.

There’s a GPS app I use called MotionX for the iPhone. It’s pretty great, and I’ve been using it for years for sailing, hiking, biking and driving. I like it so much I also got the HD version for the iPad. It includes about a dozen different map types, from satellite, to road, topos, and even NOAA charts. The nice thing is you can download the maps ahead of time (for free) so you don’t need cell signal to use it.

 

“Point A”

 

It also let’s me post my position to an online map via the phone, much like a SPOT tracking system does via satellite. You can follow our progress (or lack thereof) on the map below. Just enter channel number 23232 and hit the submit button. We’ll appear as a flag labelled EyeInHand:

 

 

direct link to map page

 

I also plan to shoot a time lapse video of the entire trip, so, if all goes as planned, look for that in a couple of weeks.

And wish us luck.

 

It’s About Time

“This way lies madness.”

 

Happy New Year everyone.

(Wait, is it already 2014 in New Zealand and Australia, or still 2013? Or already January 2, and you folks are past the hangover part and well into shamed regret?)