The Famous Road Trip '99

Ten years ago this month was the road trip. If you have known me or Darrell for any length of time, you know about this road trip. And how we played the song "Convoy" every hour on the hour for 22 days. Seriously. Darrell still has this cassette tape of our road trip theme song. Darrell & I have done several cross country road trips ('99, '00, '01, '06) but this was the one where 7 of us Camp Glisson friends rented a 15-passenger van for 3 weeks and hiked & camped out west from May 9-30. We lived out of a van for 3 weeks and had the time of our lives in some beautiful places! This was before Darrell & I were dating (we started dating later that summer). It was Doug & Naomi, Ashley, Karen, me, Clint, and Darrell. We were all Glisson friends and came home in time for another great summer as wilderness directors (Clint & I led the 10-day wilderness adventures, Karen & Darrell did 5-day wilderness and alpine tower, Doug & Ashley led the Boundary Waters Canoe Trip, and Naomi was a Sparrowwood director).

We had hoped to have a 10 year reunion this summer but with Ashley & I having babies in May and Karen having another one in August, we've postponed the reunion tour til the fall :) Oh and yeah, no baby yet for me.

Darrell has been working on putting our route together on google earth and it is really cool! Thanks to amazing satellite & streetview images we have located campgrounds, hotels, restaurants, and roller coasters we visited along the way. It has been fun to see the different things Darrell remembers and the things I remember from the trip. SOOOO many funny stories.

For anyone interested, here are our adventures that I've pieced together from my journal. Just so we can say...10 years ago today we were...driving down the California coast from San Francisco to Monterey to Carmel!!

May 9-left Georgia and drove 26 hours straight to Flagstaff, AZ. Five of us took turns driving (Darrell & Karen weren't 21 yet and couldn't drive the rental van!). Made a stop in Indian City, AZ where we bought the bull horns and tied them on front of van. A question we ask each other about once a year is: "who has the bull horns now?"
May 10-Got our first of only 3 hotel rooms - the HoJo in Flagstaff, $21! That's only $3 per person, awesome, ha!
May 11 & 12- Grand Canyon, camping (met up with my sister who is working there for the summer...now you must realize this is BEFORE cell phones...and we met up with several folks along the way - how did that ever work?!). Doug & I led the others on a trust walk to the edge of Grand Canyon for their first view of the canyon. Invited everyone in the campground to a pot luck dinner at our campsite. "Singing on the Rim"
May 13 - Hoover Dam, Las Vegas - got our second hotel room and stayed at Circus Circus. Clint & Ashley are in a Vegas show.
May 14 - Took a longer route into California so we could ride a roller coaster on the NV/CA border, Death Valley N.P., (ate at Denny's in the middle of nowhere at 11 pm and a family was having a reunion - weird!), slept in van in church parking lot.
May 15 - Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, stayed with my parents friends in Fresno
May 16 & 17 - Yosemite hiking and camping (please no earthquake...)
May 18 & 19 - San Francisco area, met up with camp friend Mallory who was traveling in Calif., got a night in hotel. We had planned on camping along the Calif coast the second night but got hyper at dinner and decided to drive onto Tahoe - 5 hours across the state. So another night in the van.
May 20 & 21 - Lake Tahoe area, drove across Nevada, Great Basin National Park
May 22 - Lehman Cave, NV and onto Moab, Utah.
May 23 - Arches N.P. (went to a Baptist church in Moab that morning...Clint said he was about to go up front and get saved after 20 minutes of singing the last hymn).
May 24, 25, & 26 - Backpacking trip in Canyonlands N.P. Hiked out early on the 26th and drove to Dillon, CO and stayed at Darrell's grandparents condo.
May 27 & 28 - Stayed with my parents friends in Boulder, CO. Visited Rocky Mtn N.P. and met up with my former Yellowstone N.P. roommate.
May 29 - Left Colorado and drove straight home 24 hours.
May 30 - Clean and return rental van!!

Some RT facts:

• Highest elevation: Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mtn N.P., 12,183 ft

• Lowest elevation: Badwater in Death Valley N.P., -282 ft

• Traveled ~7,000 miles

• # of hitchhikers picked up: ?several, I particularly remember the 2 high school girls in Tahoe who were skipping school

• # of showers: averaged about one every 2-3 days

• Visits to laundromats: 2-3? plus did laundry at the houses where we stayed along the way.

• Highest price paid for gas: $1.75/gal in Yosemite N.P. (Clint said, there better be gold in this gas!)

• I think this trip cost me about $700 total. The rental van was $300/person, then we put $150 each into an account for group expenses like gas, campsites, group groceries (used Naomi's debit card for this account - she kept up with it). I remember we ran out of our group money in Colorado - right at the end of the trip, it was perfect timing.

If I had a scanner, I would share tons of amazing road trip photos. I'll try to get some scanned in one day! Ahhh, May of 1999 - what an amazing adventure!!!