D wagon
Travel Blog Joined: September 14th 2009
Logged in: October 21st 2009
Logged in: October 21st 2009
So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore.
Dream.
Discover." - Mark Twain
Cheers to all my fellow travelers! I am a 22 year old college senior at the University of South Florida majoring in Communication. This blog will be dedicated to the memories, places, and themes of a road trip I took this past summer.
After mentally planning this trip since my junior year of high school, I finally took the step and experienced the freedom of the road three months before my 22nd birthday. My mind had been there since I entered college, at least it felt that way, but somehow I never actually believed I would take it. As I found myself trying to plan the details and secure a proper budget and time-line, the more I felt the need to just pick up and go, to forget about the responsibilities that life in society forces you to comply with and just live. I wanted to experience a life with a feeling of freedom I had never felt before. I wanted to follow my dream of exploration and discovery and realize true adventure. This road trip gave me the experience to realize my world on a personal level... to see and make sense of things that I could have only read about in books before.
This blog is a representation and collection of my travels and reflections. From the day of my last exam of my junior year at USF to the day I was forced to hike 13 hours straight down a mountain after being caught in an unexpected snow storm, this blog contains photographs, personal memories and thoughts all provoked by the few treasured weeks I spent living in the simplest sense of the word that I knew how.
Travel Blog Posts
Fires around Grand Canyon
After a day of exploring the Painted Desert, Meteor Crater, and other areas of Arizona wilderness, we woke up and headed to the Grand Canyon. We had both been looking forward to reaching this part of our trip as it was a major item on our list of to-do’s. This was a place both of us had always wanted to see and it was thrilling to finally have the opportunity. We planned on taking our backpacks down to the bottom and camp on the banks of the Colorado River. I had been keeping the wounds on my ankles and back clean with Neosporin and new gauze everyday and hoped they were up to the task. As we drove into the park, wildfires were burning throughout the woods all around the outside of the canyon. It was ... read more
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By now we were about a week into the trip and my ankles were finally feeling better. The sense of independence and freedom that being in the middle of the desert, thousands of miles away from the world I was used to was exactly as I expected it would be. I loved how I could run into the desert, climb a rock and scream at the top of my lungs and not worry about seeing another person. I would often just sit by myself in the dirt, looking at everything around me and reflect on what it was like being hundreds of miles away from civilization. It was perfect. It was everything I wanted it to be. It was rugged. I loved the feeling of being covered in dirt and dust from playing on rocks all ... read more
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New Mexico was enchanted—just like the sign said it would be. The scenery here is just astonishing. It feels and looks like a different planet. Jagged hills and rock formations and barren landscape stretched on forever. All throughout New Mexico it seemed like same barren, dry, unforgiving landscape over and over. The transition from west Texas into New Mexico was very interesting and intense. As we got further west the world felt it like it just kept getting bigger. Every state continued to amaze me. I noticed how parts of the landscape would be covered in small valleys, and canyons that met at random points. There were rocks EVERYWHERE. We stopped several times along the road to get out and run up a big hill or to climb a rock we saw from the road. We ... read more
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Oklahoma was revealed through foggy and dusty morning air. Again, the diversity of the landscape was stunning. One side of the road would be overtaken over by rolling red hills and huge pointed mounds of red dirt that gave a very rugged, worn feel while the other side of the road would be completely flat. The land told a story of a very worn, roughened and tough life. The feeling of insignificance that Texas had given me was still there throughout Oklahoma. I pulled into the wet parking lot of the Route 66 museum in Elk City, Oklahoma as the fog cleared. We bought a map of Route 66 and some postcards, then asked the cashier (who I remember as being unusually kind and helpful) where a good place to eat was. She pointed us in ... read more
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Day two of this trip started at night in Texas. With five states behind me, Texas was a big landmark in my path. I had never seen Texas before and I was very anxious to get there and experience what its landscape had to offer. As we entered the state, I realized we didn’t plan our entrance accordingly. It was pitch black in the night and all the way to Dallas was pretty much a dark void… a little disappointing for someone who had been waiting all day to see the scenery. From Dallas I merged onto I-35 N to head up to Oklahoma and link onto the famous route 66. While driving north on this road in the middle of the night, surrounded by hundreds of miles of open farm land and darkness, I drove ... read more
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After we packed our gear in the truck and took a second look at our check-list, Nate and I were on the road, eager to get out of the city. We wanted to get to Tuscaloosa, AL by mid-afternoon to visit one of my best friends from high school at the University of Alabama. Alabama's scenery was very relaxed with long, rounded hills and mountains. We decided to stop at the University of Alabama to see one of my best friends from high school. As we left Tuscaloosa I noticed another change in the landscape as it began to flatten out and disperse. We were deciding between continuing on I-20 west to Dallas or going north-west up to Oklahoma City and getting on I-40/66... we decided on going through Dallas. We both wanted to see as ... read more
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"Like a bat out of hell Ill be gone when the morning comes When the night is over Like a bat out of hell Ill be gone gone gone Like a bat out of hell Ill be gone when the morning comes When the day is done And the sun goes down And the moonlights shining through Then like a sinner before the gates of heaven Ill come crawling on back to you" The first song on the playlist I made for my drive to Athens was rattling the speakers of my 1996 Ford Ranger before I even left my neighborhood the afternoon of my departure and still conjures up the same feelings I had that day every time I listen to it. My family and girlfriend were given such short notice that they were shocked ... read more
