About the Connolly US Road Trip: Welcome. To view our blog entries, scroll to the bottom of this screen. To learn more about us, read this first:

We are a mom (Kathy) and a dad (Paul), and a reluctant 18-year-old son (JJ), and a 15-year-old son in pursuit of Ultimate Scrabble (Scott) who traveled from Connecticut to the West Coast of the US and Alaska and the Yukon in the summer of 2008. For each of us a certain type of quest took place. Paul wanted his hands on the steering wheel all the way across country and back again. For Kathy, this trip was all about getting the kids out of (what she saw as) their rut back home—friends, attitudes, habits that needed to be reexamined. Okay, she wanted them to change! JJ, for his part, spent the time wishing he were back home with his friends and, in spite of himself, absorbing, learning and—gasp—having a lot of conversations with his parents. Scott wanted to see the country and wanted to beat the Computer Scrabble on his cell phone. We were all successful in our quests--this blog tells our story.

We tell what we saw--landscape, wildlife, national parks, a cruise ship, people, roads, cities, and towns--but more importantly, we discuss the dynamics of traveling with two males whose ages can be described with the word “teen” for 11,000 miles in six weeks. We use a bit of "inside humor" in the blog, so here it is:

Mascots, Fantasies, and Other Escapes from Reality: There’s nothing like a good fantasy when you don’t know what to do with reality—this is a family who learned that lesson long ago. For instance, there’s the Kingdom of Floonia--our imaginary kingdom—that exists on a real island that emerges in the Connecticut River near our home at low tide. Floonia has been a family "inside joke" for ten years. Somewhere between Cleveland and Chicago, our vehicle, a rented Dodge Grand Caravan, was dubbed the Floonian Roadster. (It was a great car for this trip and performed flawlessly.)

We picked up a couple of toy mascots who provided much comic relief. The toy prairie dog was named Clark Griswold after we ran a “Name the Prairie Dog Contest.” Clark Griswold, you may recall, is the bumbling father in National Lampoon's "Vacation." The toy husky dog joined us in Alaska and is called Ainoolf. He got his name in the contest, too--Ainoolf is "Floonia" spelled backwards. You'll also find that the main writer, Kathy, often holds discussions with Toto, Dorothy's dog in "The Wizard of Oz." Kathy also fantasizes, from time to time, about a retreat into total hermitage—just a little one-room house in the mountains somewhere, no phones, no e-mail, no car, and no family dynamics to negotiate!

We were visited more than once by pesky little creatures Kathy calls “travel cooties”—invisible evil spirits of the road that have been known to hitch onto long distance travel parties since the dawn of time. If your travel has ever been visited by boredom, bad attitudes, snappish tempers, or “are we there yet” syndrome, you have had a breakout of travel cooties.

The photography was done by all of us at different times. Thanks for visiting. Hope you enjoy!

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