I have struggled this year to come up with a theme for this road trip. We have been just about everywhere and done just about everything we might have any interest in doing on a road trip…from the vineyards to the national parks, from the mountains to the valleys, from the rivers to the oceans. It is getting harder every year to come up with something new and unique. So, considering that wherever we go, it will likely be somewhere we have already been, we decided to call it “A Trip Down Memory Lane”. Perhaps my ever-aging eyes and my well-traveled mind will see things differently this time around and make it all new again. We shall see. This year we begin with the road trip west, unlike earlier trips when we began by spending a ... read more

We left Memphis at 7:48 and 81 degrees and headed east for Macon, GA. The ride was unremarkable. Driving on the interstate through Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama is quite pretty, with its lush green trees that line the roadsides, but as you can imagine, it gets monotonous after a while. So we entertained ourselves by listening to Shepherd Smith on Fox News as he followed the “Total Eclipse of the Sun” from Oregon all the way to South Carolina. We were traveling just south of the peak swath, so it did not get dark where we were, however, it did get quite dim…dim enough to make the streetlights come on and to make the temperature drop a full 10 degrees. They describe it as being like dusk, just after the sun sets, but I disagree. There ... read more

We left Omaha this morning at 7:40 AM and 63 degrees. (The temperatures actually got up to 93 before the day was through.) The goal was to reach the Mississippi River Byway in Fetus, MO by the end of the day. Festus is a small town of 11,000 just a few miles south of St. Louis. We made it, but it was a struggle. I was very tired today and had some difficulty being attentive. In fact, I will confess that I almost nodded off a few times, which is very unusual for me. It wasn’t so much the drive as it was a lack of sleep. Last night we had a room in a hotel where there were long-term residents and it reminded me of a college dorm. They were socializing in the hallway and ... read more

Today was a moving day. We left Great Falls, MT at 7:15 AM and 59 degrees. Brrrr. Well, it went all the way up to 81 degrees at one point, then back down to 55 and then up to 75 degrees. Clearly the weather was in a hissy fit. It was sunny, it was smoky, it was windy and it rained, and all at different times and places during the day. We had no plans for the day, just to get from point A to point B. And so we set off through Big Sky Country and headed south east. Course, due to all of the smoke in the area, the big sky was not so big today. At times the visibility was down to less than a quarter mile, so the massive mountains that I ... read more

I was really looking forward to this drive from Kalispell to Calgary, today. We drove this route a few years ago, from east to west, and it had killer views. So I had high expectations that the west to east drive would be equally as impressive. And they would have been, if it wasn’t for the fires. We left our hotel at 7:35 and 54 degrees and headed east on Canada Highway 1 only to find the beautiful scenery hidden behind a curtain of thick smoke. I am posting examples of what it should have looked like as well as photos of what it actually looked like today. (I stole them from my files, of the last trip through here.) The first part of the drive passes between a wonderful, very long lake on the left, ... read more