It was the road trip of a lifetime: three weeks, seven national parks and nearly 7,000 miles of roads across the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains and the southwestern desert. There was wildlife – everything from uncountable numbers of bison in Yellowstone National Park to a lone lizard zipping along the rocks in Arches National Park. There were landscapes of red rocks, sagebrush, cornfields and wind turbines. There were pickup trucks loaded with onions and cars with license plates from nearly all the states and from the Choctaw and Cheyenne nations. Sorry you couldn’t be with us the whole way, but here is a recap, along with some photos, which are worth at least 1,000 more words than you’ll find here.

MOTORING TO YELLOWSTONE

We left early enough on Tuesday, Sept. 15, to make it to Omaha, Nebraska. The highlight of the day was pulling off I-80 in Iowa, just over the border from Illinois, at The Worlds Largest Truck Stop in the World! (Why not say “the Universe”?) There was the usual array of knickknacks, postcards and snacks for tourists, but the LTS in the W also had everything you’d ever need for your semi, including steering wheel covers and new mud flaps to fit any rig on the road. There seems to be wind turbines in every state we passed through, and in Iowa, we stopped at a rest stop featuring a long, thin wind turbine blade that towered over the main building.

What Good Would A Cross Country Road Trip Be Without A Little Fun At The Worlds Largest Truck Stop

On the road again, we crossed Nebraska and turned north to Wyoming, where the landscape changed from the plains to the foothills of the Rockies. In Nebraska, we checked out the Pony Express station in Gothenburg, Nebraska. For some reason, Margaret was especially interested in the stop, which had lots of souvenirs. (Guess what everyone’s getting for Christmas?) We also pulled off the interstate to see The Great Plains River Road Archway outside Kearney, Nebraska. The arch crosses I-80, so it’s hard to miss, and is a showcase for the pioneers who traveled the Oregon Trail and the many other trails going west. Too bad we had no time to take the tour. As it was, we didn’t get to our next overnight stop – Casper, Wyoming, until after dark. 

Can You Guess Why The Retired Mail Carrier Enjoyed The Pony Express Stop In Nebraska?

On the third day, we arrived in Yellowstone. From Casper, we headed up, down and around the Rocky Mountain’s rocky mountains. Our track led west through the Shoshone National Forest, where the rain turned to snowflakes. By the time we got to the entrance of the Grand Tetons National Park – which abuts Yellowstone’s south border – the mountain tops were powdered with snow. We cruised past the Tetons, sure that we had lots of time to get to our cabin at the Roosevelt Lodge. However, the ranger at the Yellowstone entrance told us the road we’d planned to take had just been closed because of the snow. Instead, we would have to take the long way – a four-hour drive! It turned out to take about three hours, but it involved driving through a lot of traffic and an insistent rain that lasted into dusk. Still we got to the lodge in time for dinner and to settle into our cabin, which had no bathroom and no central heat. We found the community restrooms a few cabins away and since it was going to be a wet and cold night, we lit a fire in the metal stove that stood between our beds before we crawled into the sleeping bags we’d wisely brought along.

A Snowy / Rainy Drive In Gave Way To A Beautiful Morning At Our Cabin Inside Of Yellowstone

YELLOWSTONE

In Yellowstone, it’s all about who eats whom. (Hint: We are not at the top of the food chain.) Our program ran for three days and each day we could choose to go on various field trips – maybe an all-day hike or a half-day birdwatching - or we could stay in our cabins. (FYI: There were no Internet connections or cell phone service except at places like Old Faithful, which is nowhere near where we were staying.) In the evenings, the guides would describe where we went and what we saw, then after dinner there would be a speaker on some aspect of Yellowstone. (One night we saw film of a pack of wolves attacking a bison, on another some footage of a mountain lion eating an elk carcass, and on our last evening, there was a photographer who showed us peaceful pictures of park scenery.) By the end of our stay, we’d been to geysers and hot springs, as well as seeing wolves, bears, elk, deer - both mule deer and prong-horned deer - and various birds. We saw a few buffalo jams, where a herd of bison ambles down the roadway, blocking the tourist traffic. In fact, we saw so many bison, we didn’t even notice them anymore, until the day we were driving out of the park and – almost literally – ran into a bison meandering down the middle of the road. We sat in the Chevy, not making eye contact with the beast, until it passed us by only about a foot from the side of our Chevy!

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ON TO OREGON

After our Close Encounter of the Bison Kind, our drive to Bend, Oregon, was pretty tame. We stopped for the night in Idaho Falls and reached Bend the next day, just in time to help get Alexa, 4, and Cooper, 2, into bed. The next day, Chris and Amanda took the two of us travelers to La Pine State Park for a hike up the Obsidian Flow (cooled lava) and for a spine-tingling drive to the top of Paulina Peak! (The road up literally brings you close to the edge.) We survived the trip down from Paulina Peak, and took the kids to pick plums at Amanda’s father’s house. The next day, the two of us left the family to their jobs and preschools and took a day trip to Crater Lake National Park. Happy not to have to drive around the lake – a water-filled collapsed volcano - we boarded a trolley that took us on a 90-minute tour. Our guide Gabby told us what we were looking at and answered questions. She said that studies done to show the clarity of the water in Crater Lake were so amazing that if we were scientists the results “would lit-rally blow you out of the water!” With the image of white-coated hydrologists exploding out of the clear blue waters of Crater Lake, we drove back to Bend, stopping only to buy doughnuts, which went well with our pizza dinner that night.

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Hanging Out In Oregon Was Just Wonderful. It Was Great Seeing Chris, Amanda, Alexa and Cooper

SOUTH THROUGH UTAH

The next phase of our trip took us back east into Idaho, then south through Utah. In Salt Lake City, we stopped at Temple Square, the heart of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. We were a little puzzled to see Darth Vadar walking down the street carrying what looked like a lightsaber. No it wasn’t part of a Mormon ceremony. There was a huge Comi-Con taking place in the nearby Salt Lake City convention hall. Too bad we didn’t have time to join the crowds there. Instead we jumped into the Chevy and drove south to our next stop in Moab outside Arches National Park. The next day in Arches was the only time we ventured onto a hiking path, a long, hot, rocky “primitive” hiking path. (“I thought there’d be more arches,” Margaret said.) We stayed in Moab a second night and watched the Blood Moon rise over the swimming pool outside the hotel. The next day we saw the fantastic hoodoos, stone columns carved by the wind, in Bryce Canyon National Park.

In Utah, The Temple And The Mormon Tabernacle		Marianne At Bryce
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Natural Bridge In Bryce	Scenic Pictures From The Arches National Park

On our final day in Utah, we got to Zion National Park. Though we wondered whether we’d seen enough red rocks to last a lifetime, Zion was worth the stop. The public is not allowed to drive into the park, and by the time we got there, the parking lot inside Zion was full. We left the Chevy in the city of Springdale just outside the entrance and took a city shuttle bus to the border of the park, where we crossed a bridge over the Virgin River to get into Zion. After a quick stop at the gift shop there (more Christmas gifts!), we took park shuttle buses that stopped at eight points along the drive to the Temple of Shinawava (names courtesy of the Mormon pioneers). There we walked along the Virgin River on a path scattered with other tourists. If you go far enough, the river becomes the path, and you can wade through The Narrows, where the canyon walls close in. We didn’t go into The Narrows. Instead, we shuttled along to see other views along the drive. At one point, we made a short hike to Weeping Rock, where water seeping between shale and granite layers dropped onto our heads from an overhang.

The Great White Throne And All The Mountainous Views In Zion Were Spectacular!

A GRAND CANYON

What’s left after the national parks in southern Utah? The Grand Canyon in Arizona! But we faced a puzzle. We could go to the South Rim, where most of the tourists go and there are many (expensive) places to stay. Unfortunately, those hotels were booked up. There were far fewer people on the North Rim, but there seemed to be no places to stay. How could that be, we wondered, until we drove to the North Rim. There is a campground at the road to the North Rim park entrance, and there is a lodge in the park (all booked up), along with the Kaibab Lodge (also booked up) on the way to the park. We were heading into the park, thinking that we might have to drive another five hours to Flagstaff to find a room for the night. Then we noticed the vacancy sign in front of the Kaibab Lodge! We hustled in and learned there had been a last-minute cancellation. They had put up the vacancy sign just before we spotted it! That meant we could spend the whole afternoon taking in the view over the Grand Canyon. We had lunch at the lodge and meandered outside to watch an apparently crazy young man who ventured out on a dangerous-looking precipice over the canyon. We also had time for a short hike along the canyon rim at this last national park we visited before heading home.

The Grand Canyon Was Great. Lots Of Trails To Explore

THE WAY BACK

We were ready to get home, but we weren’t looking forward to the four days of nothing but driving, driving, driving to get there. We got to Albuquerque that first night and the next morning found enough time to cruise past the house used as Jesse Pinkman’s house in the TV show “Breaking Bad.” Later that day, we stopped in Oklahoma City, arriving late in the afternoon at the memorial to those who were at the federal building when it was bombed 20 years ago. The memorial is in downtown Oklahoma City, and we came late enough in the day that we missed the business day crowd. It was getting dark and the lights under the chairs, which represented the people who died in the bombing, started to light up. We found the name of Valerie McCarty’s dad, U.S. Army Maj. Ronald L. Bain, carved into the stone listing those who survived the bombing. 

The Oklahoma City Memorial Was Very Peaceful. We Took A Moment To Remember Ron.

The rest of the trip was much less memorable. We spent our final night on the road in Effingham, Ill. – that Effing-town – only a seven-hour drive from home the next day, Oct. 4.

You might think this is more than you need to know about our trip through 14 states and three time zones. But you don’t know how much we left out! All the Best Western hotels! Talking to OnStar for directions to the next Best Western hotel! And the old radio shows we listened to on the Chevy’s Sirius Radio!

And there were so many places we would have liked to see, but had to rush past, like the hot springs in Thermopolis, Wyoming, or the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. We kept saying, “Maybe next time,” and next time, we’ll probably just fly to Las Vegas and rent a car.