Chapter One: An Unexpected Adventure

Author's Note: This post is slightly old, as I was having trouble uploading pictures off my phone.  The following events took place on September 19th-20th. 

For the past week or so I have been getting ready for the longest road trip of my life.  Eau Claire, WI to Stanley, ID.  Roughly 1500 miles.  Covering the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.  And my reward for this long trip?  Arriving at the places where I will be working and living for the next year.  Camp Perkins in Stanley, ID and Trinity Lutheran Church in Eden, ID.

I did my best to prepare as well as I could.  I cleaned my car inside and out.  I went and got an AAA membership.  I booked a hotel and planned gas stops.  I stocked up on snacks.  I managed to fit the majority of my life into my car.  I programmed the GPS.  I was ready.

Let's rock and roll!

Before this trip, the farthest I had ever driven straight shot was about 10 hours.  That was only once, however, and it was with another person.   The farthest I have ever driven by myself is about 4 hours.  Needless to say, I set a lot of new records with this trip.

Record Number of Driving Hours in 48 Hours: 22 hours
Record Number of Driving Hours, Straight Shot: 12 hours
Record Time between Pit Stops: 5 hours
Record Number of Road Kill Spotted: 74 dead animals

Honestly, the most surprising thing about this trip was how relatively easy it was.  I was prepared to get bored, to get sleepy, to want nothing more than to get out of the car and stop driving.  And while by the end of each day I was always very stiff and sore from sitting for 10-plus hours in a car, I never got bored and I never got tired.  Each state had its own challenges for driving.  Minnesota had the most traffic and construction to deal with, which was why I was glad to get that part out of the way early on in the trip.  North Dakota was great for just eating up the miles.  Lots of straight roads with almost no traffic.  You could just set the car in cruise and head for the horizon.  Montana was where the mountains first began to make their presence felt, and they just got bigger as I headed through Yellowstone into Idaho.

One of the hardest parts of this trip was that once I got to the western edge of North Dakota, I kept wanting to stop the car and get out to take in all the amazing scenery.  I also wanted someone with me to exclaim over all the cool stuff we were seeing.  While I did not have a person to do this with, as they wouldn’t have fit in the car, I did have Cow.

This is Cow:

Hello!

He sat on the front dashboard the whole trip, with his cute little face looking at me.  Yes, Cow is a boy.  Don’t ask me how I know.  Whenever I saw something particularly awesome, I would look at Cow and say, “Cow, isn’t that amazing!”  And Cow would agree that, yes, it was pretty amazing.

It’s always nice to have someone to share an adventure with.

Cow with cows.

While there was amazing scenery for much of the trip, there were several spots that stuck out.  The first was Teddy Roosevelt National Park in the western part of the North Dakota.  It reminded me a lot of the Black Hills in South Dakota, with just an endlessly stretching view of hills.  Here are some pictures of the numerous hills that formed up the park:

I got to drive through these hills later.

It was *really* windy.

It was incredibly windy that day.  Like, I’m talking about a wind that stayed consistently at 30mph with gusts even greater than that.  When I was driving, whenever I passed trucks on the road my car would be flung a little bit to the left once I got past them and faced the wind once more.

The next spot was driving through Yellowstone, which was probably the highlight of the trip.  I drove probably 2 hours or so through the mountains of Yellowstone, and it was stunningly beautiful.  Mountains jutting up everywhere you looked, covered with alpine pines.  Craggy rock faces right up against the road.  Crystal-clear mountain streams bubbling merrily over rocks.  It made me want to get out and go camping, right then and there.    Here are some pictures, although obviously a picture does not do it any sort of justice:

Lots of mountains and trees and rocks and streams.

My head looks as big as a mountain here.

A bubbling mountain stream.

The final spot that made me go, “Wow!” was driving through the Galena Pass, the mountain range that leads into Camp Perkins.  At this point in the trip I knew I was very close to my destination (under a half hour), but I also knew I had to go to the bathroom very, very, very badly.  So I was not able to take in the beauty of these mountains as much as I should have.  At one point I just had to stop, however, and take some pictures, bathroom or no.  They were just…too…EPIC!  Here it is:

When I caught a glimpse of this it took my breath away.

One slight disappointment about the mountains was that in many places smoke (from various forest fires) made the views not quite as grand as they normally were.  In a lot of places they had signs asking drivers to turn their headlights on because the smoke created a fog-like atmosphere.  At the end of the day, though…they were still freaking mountains!

And so it came to pass that 38 hours, 1500 miles, 1 bag of Swedish fish, 3 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, 1 nectarine, 2 bananas, 1 bag of goldfish crackers, and a handful of snap peas after setting out in Eau Claire, I finally arrived at Camp Perkins.

Made it!

One adventure down, many more to go!

Bilbo Baggins: "I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains, and then find somewhere where I can rest."