The End: A Final Wrap-Up

Now that I've finished traveling, I'm at home, contacting and interviewing with different civil firms throughout eastern Virginia. I want to say thanks for reading to the end, and I hope it was an adventure to hear about my own adventure. It was fun for me to step outside my comfort zone and chronicle the trip like this.

Before...

...and after!

I compiled some facts about the trip that I found interesting:

Total days: 99
Total miles: 17,700
States visited: 48
National Forests we camped in: 11
National Parks we camped in or visited: 16
State parks we camped in: 4
Total number of nights we camped: 51
Gas stations visited: 56
Number of friends or family we stayed with: 17

There are so many odd or strange things to count; I could go on and on.

Surprisingly, I ended the trip under budget - including fixing the car troubles we ran into. We budgeted the trip to cost about $4,600 for each of us, and it ended up costing me just under $4,000. The largest cost was fuel; we each spent $1,400 on gas and used about 800 gallons of gas total to travel the country. The federal land pass saved us hundreds of dollars and was a great investment for a trip like this. We kept things cost-efficient because of the style of the trip: we camped a lot and bought food from the grocery store, but we still had some great foodie, touristy, and fun experiences when we stayed with others. Considering what I got to see and do, I believe the trip was an incredible bargain.

The path of the trip - my map finally complete!

This is the end of my posts about the trip these past 3 months. Thanks, and I hope it was fun - it sure was for me!

Back to Virginia

Wednesday night we arrived in Auburn, AL to stay two nights with David. He is a grad student in English at Auburn University, and he had met us previously to join our weekend in Nashville. The drive didn't seem too bad, though it was about 12 hours. Driving through the Alabama countryside was the first time it hit me: there weren't anymore deserts or mountains or red cliffs. There was green grass, trees, and farms - this looked like home!

On Thursday, we organized and cleaned some, taking a day to catch up before a hectic weekend in Blacksburg. We also explored Auburn's campus. Here, the Southern influence was very strong: the campus had traditional brick architecture and centered around the massive football stadium, and the majority of the undergrad students were involved in a fraternity or sorority.

Friday was the critical day that we had been focused on for weeks: we drove back to Virginia. Looking back, arriving at Virginia Tech and arriving at home in Poquoson were great feelings, but they were not overwhelmingly emotional. What was overwhelmingly emotional was crossing into Virginia: this was the moment at which I finally felt home. We stopped at the welcome sign to take our last - our 48th - state picture. My eyes (slightly watery) felt glued to this huge white sign and everything that it meant: the trip was incredible, but it was hard, and this huge white sign meant that I was back, back to the people, places, and opportunities that awaited at the end of the journey.

Home!

We saw old friends and old faces in Blacksburg, and we went to the VT vs. North Carolina football game on Saturday with David. It felt good to be so close to home.

After the weekend, I drove home on Monday stopping to drop Jenna off along the way, ending our journey. We finished what we started out to do, and now we're home! I'll post more about that in one last blog post during the next few days - a summary of interesting facts and a look back on the trip.

Across Texas

Leaving New Mexico on Monday, we headed into Texas, but not before swinging briefly up to Kansas and Oklahoma for state sign pictures there. In my opinion, Texas is one of the biggest "can't see it all" casualties on the trip: we drove through the northern part of the state, stopping for only two nights. The size of Texas is a challenge because of the time and money involved to cross the state, not to mention we had no connections south or west of Dallas. So, though it's a shame to me, we bypassed much of the state. I'll have to visit in the future.

Our first night, we stopped in a small hotel in Childress, TX. The experience in this small town was exactly what I envisioned of Texas: a lot of cowboy hats and boots, very big trucks, and thick accents. I enjoyed people-watching during dinner at a small restaurant. My experience from traveling the states is that Texas and California are two states that have really developed a culture of their own with interesting differences from anywhere else, and I really like observing these differences.

After two long days on the road split by our night in Childress, we arrived to Dallas to meet Matt, an MV alumnus who played in the tuba section with me for 3 years and moved to Texas to work at Texas Instruments. What I noticed on the drive into Dallas was the sprawl: the land is so flat and abundant near Dallas that things just kept moving outwards. A current map of Dallas shows the numerous encircling beltways and huge metropolitan area that has developed.

Downtown Dallas on the drive in

On Tuesday night, we walked around the uptown Dallas area near where he lived. Like most cities, the trendy and hip uptown area was full of younger professionals, wealth, garden-style condos, and restaurants that all looked worthy of a visit. We ate at Urban Taco, an incredibly delicious modern take on Mexican food. Afterwards, we walked around and headed up the parking deck Matt's apartment. While his apartment had no view at all, the top of the parking deck was 6 stories up and overlooked the entire nighttime skyline of Dallas.

The next morning, we drove out of Dallas for a long-haul day across the South to Auburn University to meet up again with my good friend David. As we left Dallas, we drove through the High Five - one of the country's tallest, biggest, and most complex highway interchanges. It is so named because there are five planes of ramps and highways stacked on top of one another. I thought this was neat, though most people wouldn't think twice about it.

A bad picture of driving through the High Five

The long drive after flying through the High Five would leave us at Auburn and with only two days left before our exciting return to Virginia!

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Taos, NM

On Saturday, we hit the road east for a long drive back across part of the Rockies on Highway 160. It was pretty and green, and the snow-capped mountains looked tall in the distance.

Colorado driving

Eventually we crossed the Rockies (where they were plowing the snow off the top of the passes already) and drove into the San Luis Valley in eastern Colorado. Here, we planned to visit and camp one night at the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

We arrived to find that it was National Public Lands Day - which means free admission to national parks. (Ironically, 3 days later, every national park in the country would shut down...)

In this valley in Colorado, wind patterns have been depositing sediment for 500,000 years in order to blow up and over the Rockies. This has left an enormous dune field, right next to the Rockies and bordered by otherwise by two streams. It is very strange at first, but it's very cool.

Looking to the valley past the beginning of the dunes

We hiked to the top of "High Dune," one of the first major peaks in the dune field. The dunes are open to everyone, and there are no marked trails; you simply make your own way to the top.

Looking up to the top - over a 1 mile hike

Looking down from the top

After leaving the sand dunes on Sunday, we drove south through New Mexico and stopped by the oldest still-inhabited village in the United States: the Taos Pueblo. Here we took a tour of the old village, learning both about the adobe architecture of the 1300 year-old buildings there and some about the pueblo Indian culture of the tribe. The architecture and buildings were neat; small markets and shops were in the first floors selling things like Indian-made shoes, jewelry, and adobe oven-baked bread. The culture was closed and guarded - I have no pictures here because cameras weren't allowed in due to the tribe's ongoing preparations for a harvest festival. Their religious ceremonies and practices are secret and kept within themselves, strangely opposite of the outward-spreading goals of larger religions.

Late on Sunday afternoon we left Taos, NM and headed east. After crossing the last part of the Rockies, we were back on the plains again and camped on the east side of the state: next stop, Texas!