In search of the continuous road trip
I’m unsure now of the chronology of it, but somewhere between Wall Drug, the Corn Palace, and the Four Corners, we visited Mesa Verde on one of the road trips of my childhood. I also remember stopping to visit a friend of my parents in Newport Beach, California. …
I first visited Mesa Verde as a kid and I loved it. I wasn’t sure it would be worthwhile to return, but we’ve got the time and the campground has free showers, so we decided to go for it. Visiting a place as an adult …
After surviving our epic trip across Texas, we finally arrived in the dark of night at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, escorted by swarms of bats that we imagined were from nearby Carlsbad Cavern. The last time we were here, we got snowed out. We’ve been looking …
Heaven is located about an hour from Panama City, FL (aka the Redneck Riviera). Heaven is the State Park on St. Joseph Peninsula, a tiny sandbar that juts into the Gulf of Mexico near the middle of nowhere. This area calls itself the forgotten coast. …
We had been warned that Great Smoky Mountains National Park was the busiest park in the country. But it’s hard to imagine what 9,000,000 visitors per year means, or even what 60,000 visitors per busy weekend looks like. And then we got there and we …
Crunch…crunch…crunch…snuffle snuffle. I really wanted to see a black bear in The Breaks Interstate Park, which straddles the border between Kentucky and Virginia, and this seemed like our chance. We were right next to the van, so we could jump in when it approached. Perfect. …
We trust Google with most directions. I spend much of our driving days on the Google Maps Android app (while Lisa drives). Most days end up being uneventful — we just find where we want to go. Driving to Breaks Interstate Park … not so …
Between Cleveland and Akron, OH lies one of the newest National Parks in the US, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park (est. 2000). We meandered through it on our way south after leaving Cleveland. Honestly, the vibe is a bit odd. I grew up just outside Milwaukee, …
Crystal Bridges Museum, Alice Walton’s (a Walmart heiress) attempt at ennobling Arkansas, is great. Its architecture is striking, its setting is beautiful, and its art is provocative. If it was just a park that you could wander through, it’d be amazing. The museum and reception venue put it …
The trip through the Mines of Moria was always my favorite part of the Lord of the Rings books. As a kid, I read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth as if it were a factual account of a fantastical place I …
I’d never heard of Guadalupe National Park, tucked in the corner of Texas in that spot where the big state slides in between New Mexico and Mexico. And while we spent about 24 hours there, I still don’t know much about the place. We rolled …
Some people come to Rockhound State Park to spend a few cheap, quiet weeks or nights in the desert. Most come for the rockhounding, aka amateur geologying, searching in various levels of seriousness for semi-precious stones like opals, minerals like quartz and jasper, and geodes. …