Heading further Oeste

Following the long journey across Missouri and Kansas, we finally arrived in Denver looking for some help in filling our propane tank. After multiple unsuccessful attempts, we parked in downtown Denver to explore the area. I quickly remembered the presence of the Greenpeace members soliciting donations, as we were approached by a good 15 people in our short hour walk through the city. After some disc golf in Arvada, we headed towards Granby where we’d be meeting up with a high school friend, Mike Armstrong, at the dude ranch he’s working at for the summer.

I-70 threw its first test at us as we ascended the front range…and Evan and I couldn’t have had larger smiles on our face. As we began to head up hill, Hoppy kept slowing and slowing until we finally found a nice spot in second gear that would give us a reliable 30 miles per hour up the hill. We certainly weren’t in any hurry to get anywhere, and it was a good thing because we didn’t have a choice. We made it through the mountains after driving through some snow and dropped into the valley where Granby lies under the auspice of gray clouds and a fine drizzle. We drove right into the ranch and found Mike sweeping the floors like a good first year ranch hand. We dropped off his mandolin, stayed the night and went on our way to Rocky Mountain National Park.

After greeting an adolescent moose at the entry gates, we made the decision to drive to where the summit pass was closed to cross our fingers and hope they opened the road. Holly and I went through this same procedure last year and got shut down, so we had to drive a couple hours out of the way to get where we were going. So we drove to the parking lot at 11,000 ft. and decided to go for a hike to pass the time until we were sure they wouldn’t open the gate. A short hike proved difficult to complete because of the deep snow and no tracks to follow. We found a steep hill to body slide down to pass the time and shortly after we returned to the car, some rangers appeared out of the fog and opened the gate! It’s hard to convey the excitement we experienced then, as we would have had to drive another 2 hours to detour and continue heading north. We had our doubts as to how Hoppy would handle the high elevation…but she didn’t seem to mind. The ranger warned of the 50 ft. visibility because of the intense fog, so we unfortunately didn’t get to see much of the surroundings on the highest paved road in the continental US (12,183 ft). We dropped down the east side and found a campsite in one of the few campgrounds that was open. There has been significant damage to the forests in the area due to the pine beetle infestation. The pest has killed entire hillsides and appears to eat all of the bark off the trees. It looked eerily like autumn in some places because of the deep green and auburn mix of tree colors from a distance. A large number of campsites were closed because they had to clear all of the trees in the area. The next day the weather cleared and allowed us a magnificent view of the skyline.

After a quick stop through Boulder to show Evan Pearl St., we headed north to Fort Collins to visit my friend Christina Minihan from my last study abroad in Australia. We had an incredible stay in FoCo, as they call it, where we went on brewery tours, played in the park, climbed trees, a little disc golf, food fights, fishing, etc. Christina is a ball of energy and happened to have some time off from her internship to be an incredible host. One of the highlights of Fort Collins is the New Belgium Brewery, a staple of the local economy and of the social scene. Every day they offer free tastings and there is always a crowd ready to have four glasses of whatever you want to sample off the menu. Atlanta has a few breweries that have the same premise but none are as generous as New Belg. They have a fun atmosphere, as the best known symbol of their company is the cruiser bicycle after their headlining beer Fat Tire. They had hula-hoops outside for the people waiting to keep themselves busy with, postcards that they would mail for free, disc golf discs for sale, and a wait staff that was incredibly welcoming. One of the more interesting facts I remember from the tour was that the founding couple of the brewery were originally an electrical engineer and a social worker. I was intrigued by the change in lifestyle they must have gone through after gaining success…supposedly they founded the company vision while on a hike together. Crazy Coloradoans. We toured the Colorado State University campus while there, they have an incredible green space in the middle of campus that is lined with old growth trees and is just plain expansive. Christina was moped-sitting for somebody, so Evan and I got to ride around campus looking like the guys from Dumber and Dumber. It was just generally a really fun stop that brought me back to my childhood a little bit, just being silly around the neighborhood.

Heading west through southern Wyoming, we stopped next outside Ogden, UT at Snowbasin Ski Resort. They helped host the Winter Olympics in 2002 and are a very expensive resort to ski at. We tried to mountain bike here but were 3 weeks too early for the mountain to be open. So instead we played disc golf during the 40 degree rain/hail storm. It was only a 9 hole course and the 9th hole was a doozie…488 ft with a 134 ft. drop in elevation. We promptly lost 4 discs on this hole, as the wind would catch your drive and throw it deep into the woods for you to go find. I found all but one, fortunately. We left Snowbasin and went to Eden to visit my dad’s aunt and uncle, Le and Gordon Langren whose condo I stayed at to ski in March. They kindly allowed us to join them for dinner, some card games, and again for breakfast. They told me about some relatives in Boise, our next stop. They also mentioned that they would be in the Portland area later in the week, just like we were going to be. We left with a few more resources than we came with, and looked forward to seeing them again soon.

The drive from northern Utah to southern Idaho is a mundane one. Idaho has a phrase that it uses: “Keep Idaho Green” – it’s questionable whether this part of Idaho was ever green to start with. We arrived in Boise to meet my dad’s uncle, Glen and Helen Fairborn, relatives I don’t think I had every previously met. These are relatives of my dad’s birthmother who passed away in 1968, and are some of the kindest people I’ve ever met. They invited us for dinner and breakfast as well, after a wonderful tour around Boise. Glen worked for Ore-Ida, the well known potato/French fry company. It took a while to dawn on me where the name Ore-Ida came from…but it wasn’t long until I realized where I was in the country – near the border of Oregon and Idaho. Georgia Tech played in the Humanitarian Bowl there at Boise State multiple times while I was in college so I recognized their stadium. One of the main things we wanted to do while here was float the river through town, a popular thing to do in the summer. Unfortunately, they were letting a lot of water out of the dam upstream that flooded the river and made it dangerous. We played a little disc golf and headed out of town seeking the Oregon Coast.

Starting off in Hoppy

Howdy Pilgrim! After crossing the Mississippi and finding some time to sit down to start the account of yet another summer of freedom and travel, I begin to realize yet again how lucky of a kid I am. Evan Wimpey, a friend of mine (of internet fame from the “Lecture Crashers” videos on Youtube) from Georgia Tech, is driving my 1984 Toyota Huntsman Motorhome that has been chugging straight from St. Louis to Denver like a champ today (16 hrs). This style of travel isn’t for everyone, because we oftentimes have trouble pushing 55 mph over the rolling his of the Great Plains, but after a few hours of realizing there’s no hurry anyways, the RV (from here on known as “Hoppy”) begins to grow even more on you. We’ll talk more about my summer home in a little bit.

I began the journey last Thursday, May 28^th when I picked Evan up from a MARTA station in north Atlanta. He threw his bags in the back and had the biggest smile on his face for the first few hours from the pleasant surprise of such an incredible road tripping vehicle. From there, we made our first stop in Franklin, TN to see Gil and Jill Eustice, the parents of my former girlfriend Melissa Eustice who passed away in a car accident in Feb. 2008. I coached the summer league swim team for two summers with Megan and Melissa while their dad Gil ran the actual meets and the officiating. The Eustice’s moved to TN a couple years ago and I really wanted to get to spend an evening with them in their new home. They are infamous for having lots of cats, and there was no mistake as we were greeted by 13 of them. They had an elusive white squirrel that lived in the back yard that’s managed to stay away from their grasp. After a nice dinner and time to catch up on their new Tennessee life, Evan and I headed north to Bowling Green, KY where we’d be caving at Mammoth Cave National Park the next day.

Arriving right on time to our 6 hour tour of Mammoth on the Wild Cave tour, a concert pianist named Janet Smith was our guide for the day. Janet proceeded to bring us up to speed on what we were getting ourselves into, and said that where and how far we went would be determined by our abilities to keep up. There were only 6 of us on the tour, all in good shape (as weren’t allowed on the tour if you exceeded certain dimensions because we’d be squeezing through crevices all day) so I was excited about a serious day of caving. We descended into a 230 ft. deep shaft that had been blasted to access deeper parts of the cave, where we popped out into a nice big cavern. We walked along the cavern for a bit, came upon a small hole next to a rock on the side, and proceeded head first down the hole for our first crawl. Janet is a speedy caver…did I mentioned she’s 73 and leads this tour every summer? Our expedition covered 6 miles over the course of the day and took us through holes that you could only squeeze through if you laid out like Superman and inched your way through them. One of my favorite parts was when we all got to a spot where we could sit together and turn our lights out and experience the intense darkness and silence that deep under ground. I can’t imagine exploring the cave in a time where your oil lantern could fail and leave you stranded 8 hours underground. Not the kind of thing I’m interested in. These caves are much different than the stereotypical cave site because they connect together to make an incredibly long network – 370 miles and growing! They still actively find new passages. The caves are different additionally in the sense that they were formed by flowing water and thus do not have much in the way of stalactites or stalagmites, as the area above the caves is largely capped by sandstone which prevents water from seeping in. I really enjoyed the parts of the tour where we popped out from under a rock into a large cavern where a different tour group happened to be walking by…I could imagine how jealous I would’ve been if I were one of the kids on that tour. At the end of the day, we were filthy, tired, and hungry, but extremely happy with our caving experience. Just for information, if you wondered what “spelunking” means like I did, spelunking is what a novice caver participates in. If you have experience caving, then you are a true caver.

From Bowling Green, we ventured west to St. Louis. The weather was superb all weekend for us, raining only at night while we were asleep. We made our first grocery stop, went on the Annheiser-Busch brewery tour, stopped at the famous Arch and learned a lot about St. Louis’ role in the westward expansion of the US. I guess I’ve crossed the Mississippi on road before, but learning more about Tom Sawyer, riverboating, and what it must’ve been like to ford the river was very rewarding. We met up with college friends Eli Riddle (at Washington University’s Med School) for some famous Ted Drewe’s Frozen Custard. It goes to show that a business really has something special when the locals are as numerous as the tourists late on a Saturday night. Some of Eli’s friends recently graduated from Yale in New Haven, CT, so it was nice to get some insight on what my new home will be like. The following day we met up with Patrick Odneal (working near his hometown at the world’s largest concrete plant) and toured the St. Louis Cathedral and Forest Park. The Cathedral was incredible, one of the few churches esteemed enough to have the “Basilica” designation. The entire ceiling of the building was covered in mosaic tiles, taking 84 years to complete. Afterwards, we drove around St. Louis’ flagship park that covers more ground than Central Park. The plethora of free museums, expansive greens, sports fields, pavilions, etc. was impressive and is something to be cherished by the resident’s there. We set up my slackline for a little fun in one of the groves of trees. You’ll see me talk more about that later but slacklining is a balance control ‘sport,’ if you will, where you tie a 1” wide nylon strap really tight between two trees and essentially tight rope walk across it. It’s fun, easy to set up, free, and challenging. We had some St. Louis style pizza and then played disc golf outside of town. St. Louis was a fun place to visit, emphasized by some great friends and incredible weather.

Hoppy has been running fabulous. I didn’t know what to expect from small truck a year older than me, but the 97 hp 4 cylinder hasn’t had any trouble yet. We’ve had to add a little oil and a little radiator fluid but otherwise haven’t had any complaints. We learned a little bit about packing groceries against doors that could open during turns, but otherwise haven’t had too bad of luck with the novice camper syndrome. My parents were extremely helpful in getting me prepared and set up to hit the road, I certainly couldn’t have done it without them.

My road trip is tentatively planned to last until July 15^th, when I will return home, pack up my stuff, and head to Connecticut. My two roommates Jon Berggren and Steve Young will have already been working for a month and will hopefully have most everything figured out by the time I get there. We settled on a nice little 4 br 1 ½ ba in the west haven part of New Haven, check it out at 128 Maplewood Ct. New Haven, CT on Google maps. I start work on July 27^th and am excited about the working world. Oh wait, I have 2 more months of road tripping before then…woohoo!