Going for a Drive

My tenth grade history teacher, Mr. Lewinter, was a world traveller. One day, class discussion turned to places people would visit once they graduated. Mr. Lewinter, though he’d been all over the place, urged us to “See America first.”

OK, so it wasn’t until years later (last week, in fact) that I discovered that the phrase wasn’t his. It was actually created by a railway company in 1906 to promote a resort in Montana that would become Glacier National Park. But still, something about it stuck with me.

We spend a lot of time at Amanda’s place watching The Travel Channel. Her cable system is pretty weak (three shopping networks and two Jesus channels out of about 25 channels total), and the Travel Channel tends to be a good compromise between ESPN Classic and HGTV. Last year we watched a show about the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. Mr. Lewinter’s exhortation came back to me, and I (half-jokingly) suggested to Amanda that we drive to Glacier the summer after we graduated.

As you may have guessed by now, it turned out not to be a joke at all. In a little over three weeks, Amanda and I are getting in my car and leaving for Niagara Falls (no, we aren’t getting married there). Then we’re going to Toronto, driving around the northern shore of Lake Huron into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. From there, we’ll be visiting (roughly in order):

• The House on the Rock
• Mount Rushmore
• Devil’s Tower
• Yellowstone National Park
• Glacier National Park
• Seattle
• Corvallis and maybe some Oregon coast
• Crater Lake
• Redwood National Park
• The Pacific Coast Highway
• Golden Gate National Recreation Area
• The San Diego Zoo
• Vegas (We’re not getting married there, either)
• Grand Canyon
• Chaco Canyon
• Carlsbad Caverns
• San Antonio
• New Orleans
• Atlanta
• Rock City at Lookout Mountain

As evidenced by the first and last sites on our list, we’ve been heavily influenced by Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The list is also not exhaustive, of course, because we’ll be driving from place to place and seeing a lot in between, as well.

For shelter, we’ll be camping. This is a big step for me, as my family experimented with camping when I was younger and I didn’t take to it at all. I’m hoping I’ll handle it better now that I’m older; if not, Amanda is in for a rough six weeks.

Fortunately, we have a few places where we’ll get a roof over our heads: we know people in Corvallis, San Diego, and New Orleans who have offered to put us up, and we both have family in Atlanta. We’re also staying in a hotel in Vegas because, hey, that’s the thing to do, right?

Anyway, that’s about it. I may have alluded to the trip here before, but I never really came out with details, and I figured it was time. I’ll write more about it in the next few weeks as we make our final preparations and as I completely freak out and wonder why we’re doing it.

May 04, 2004 - 07:16 PM