3,432 miles

Hello from Ashland, OR!

It was a very fun road trip across the country with my Dad, but both of us were very glad to be done driving (total distance was indeed 3,432 miles) by the tenth day. Here's a little summary of the trip, with a link to pictures at the end. And while pictures are worth a thousand words, they may make a little more sense in conjunction with the following summary.

We left southern MD early in the morning Friday, July 1st, and drove about 11 hours that day to Mt. Eden, KY, where we camped at a state park. On the second day, we drove in the morning and then spent the afternoon in St. Louis, MO, at City Museum. City Museum is an awesome playground/architectural structure made up of trash found around St. Louis.  It's fun for adults and kids alike, and I imagine one could spend days there and still not get through everything. I highly recommend it to anyone traveling to or through St. Louis- just be sure to wear sneakers and clothes you can move around easily in! Here's a link to their website: http://www.citymuseum.org/home.asp

From there we traveled to the middle of Kansas to stay with a friend of mine, Anisha, and her husband Ben, on their cattle farm. They raise Black Angus cattle to sell for breeding, so they are out in the country. We had dinner with the whole family- Anisha, Ben, Anisha's sister and parents- and I have to say that the steak (from their cattle) was the best I have ever hand in my life, hands down. The rest of the dinner was pretty good too :-) They also have many cats, and a big Great Dane, Obie, who weighed almost twice as much as me! He was a sweetheart and loved all the attention.

Our next stop was in Denver, CO, to stay and visit with my Dad's cousin Susan, and her husband Jay. We got to watch fireworks (since it was the 4th of July) out of their front window, at least until we were too tired to keep our eyes open. After breakfast the next morning, we made a quick visit to the Denver Botanical Gardens, and drove to Rocky Mountain National Park, stopping in Boulder on the way. Obviously RMNP was fantastic; I think the pictures speak for themselves here.

Our next stop was in Moab, UT. Our schedule didn't allow us to spend as much time here as we wanted, but it's a nice town with lots of stuff to do outside. We drove over to Potash Road, where we saw petroglyphs and lots of lizards, with the goal of doing some climbing. As (bad) luck would have it though, I sprained my ankle slipping at about 10 feet of the first climb, so I wasn't able to do much climbing after that. But I definitely plan on going back at some point and doing some climbing in this area. The next day, as we drove by Salt Lake City, we made a detour into the mountains to check out the towns of Alta and Snowbird, some popular skiing areas. They had over 700 inches of snow this year, or over 50 feet, so of course there was still a lot of snow on the ground.

The last leg of the trip through Nevada seemed very long, with repetitive scenery and not much to see. We did see some feral burros near the OR-NV border.

I think that's a pretty complete summary of our road trip, so as far as pictures go, I have an album on Facebook (conveniently titled" Roadtrip to Oregon"!), so if you are on FB, you can look at the pictures there. If you aren't, just email me, and I can send you a link to the album.

And thanks for reading this long post all the way to the end!