35 Days. 29 States. 20 Capitals. 4 Provinces.
Post 0 - Prologue Post - A little background and some teaser pics
Out: Orange.....Return: Blue
Wahpeton, North Dakota (Day 31)
I've been home for over nine months already, returning mid-June 2025. The trip is a fond, but ever receding memory right now. Luckily, editing the 6,000 photos taken helps to remember what an epic journey it turned out to be. What's left here are hopefully the good ones. This started as a fairly substantial thread in it's own right, but continued to grow. What gets left on the cutting room floor? Not much, apparently. Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound as you Brits say.
- - - - Warning: This thread is long..........War & Peace long.......Seriously long - - - -
Chimney Rock, Nebraska (Day 3)
This trip was over 30 years in the making. I have always enjoyed long car trips, starting as a kid when my dad carted us all around the country, and continuing after I got my own wheels. Early on, after college in a 12 year stretch, I had two cars take me through 285,000 miles - staying primarily on the western side of the Continental Divide. However, at one point as a young man in 1992, I saw a 4th generation Cadillac Seville STS for the first time. Never once had I ever cared about a Cadillac, but this baby caught my eye. It was Motor Trend's Car of the Year.
I immediately thought: "When I finally get enough money, this is the car that could take me across the whole county - in luxury, comfort, style and sport. They were retailing for about $50,000 (Yikes!) and I hadn't even spent more than $17,000 on a new car yet. By 1994, it had a 300hp Northstar V-8 engine with 295 lb-ft of torque. Transmission enhancements, suspension modifications, a BOSE sound system and.....rain sensing wipers!!! Sign me up.
Alas, it was not to be. I knew this car would end it's production run long before I would have a use for it. Or the money. Or the time needed for such a long trip. I did, however, find my way to BMW a dozen years later, and 10 years after that I ventured into the realm of BMW V8s. Now we're talking road trip cars.
Those V8s gave me 13 major trips spread over 9 years and 41,757 miles of visiting the outrageous natural wonders of the West.
2019 Utah Hwy 163 (2019 F90)
2021 Rocky Mountain National Park (2021 F90 Comp)
2022 Sedona, AZ (2022 M850)
2023 Southern Utah (2022 M850)
2023 Jasper National Park (2022 M850)
2023 Glacier National Park (2022 M850)
People would ask me, "So, where to next?" I would always jokingly(?) say, "I want to step out of
MY car in Halifax."
Nova Scotia? "Yes." Most of our trips have been 10 to 14 days and around 4,000 miles. It's 3,700 miles just to Halifax by the most direct route, so I figured it would require at least 5,000 miles each way. (Hell, I can actually get to Miami in under just 3,300 miles. It's a long way out to the Maritime Provinces.) We would now be more than double our longest trip - and there would probably, undoubtably, be more mileage added on. Even our 14 day trips can be a bit of a grind - occasionally. Hrrrrm - I'd been mentally tossing this around for over 30 years - maybe I didn't quite think this ALL the way through.
Missouri State Capitol (Jefferson City) (Day 6)
By early 2025 the wife kept asking if I had the Halifax trip planned. "Yeah, just about." It wasn't. Eventually I realized she's game. Time to call her bluff. Some quick, serious number crunching told me at least 35 days were required. She didn't balk. "Gonna be over 10,000 miles," I said. "OK" was the reply.
Gateway Arch - St. Louis, Missouri (Day 7)
Well, dang - this is happening, I guess. Its gotta be springtime, when everything is green and there's not much chance of late winter snows. Can't be July or August when the mid-west swelters in heat and humidity. Seems like mid-May to mid-June, but then you risk tornado season. We'll chance it. How bad could it be? Turns out, pretty bad. More on that later.
Pemaquid Point, Maine (Day 16)
My goals were to see the great Mid-Western cities, several historical sites, Washington DC (the wife hadn't been since the 8th grade), the Hudson Valley, New England again, the Canadian Maritime Provinces, Quebec City and upstate New York. Then back through the Mid-West again. Even if Halifax was the ultimate destination, it wasn't going to be just about the destination. It was truly going to be about the journey. We'd already scoured the Great Lakes area, New England, most of the East Coast and the South. (in rental cars, I might add. Ick.) So, two parallel tracks (out and back) south of Chicago would fill in a lot of gaps.
Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia (Day 18)
Average daily mileage would need to be 300 - at least. A three night stop in DC and two nights each in Halifax and Quebec City meant four days would end up being zero miles. So the average mileage on driving days would be 350 now. That's a lot of driving if you actually stop to eat and see things along the way.
Wheeling, West Virginia (Day 26)
The route came together in about a week (I've had a mental route for 30 years) and 34 nights in 30 hotels were booked by early March.
There was virtually no margin for error. This had to be a nearly flawless execution for it to work, because if you need to rebook one hotel, you might have to rebook 20. (As it turned out, we rebooked one - with no ensuing catastrophe.) If you meandered along, and just stopped for the night whenever you felt like it, you'd be gone two months - not to mention burning up a lot of extra time each day looking for that day's hotel. Gotta have a goal each day.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa (Day 29)
All of my road trip threads up until this one (I've done 13, with 8 of them making it to the Main Page - Edit: 9 now, counting this one), have involved the fabulous scenery and the wonderful National Parks in the West. That all ends East of Denver (OK, I'll give you Niagara Falls out there), but it was just as much fun - and interesting - seeing the places that created all the history and generated all the things that made this such a great country. It seems like we couldn't get away from Lewis & Clark, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington for major portions of the journey.
Hwy 212 Beartooth Pass, Montana (Day 33)
I made up a preliminary list of about 250 items of interest along the route. And, we had also rewatched the Smithsonian Channel's Aerial America episodes for each state we would visit. We was gonna be busy. Let's get to it............
Aside from the overall route goals for the trip, there are many specific things that draw my interest. First and foremost are natural wonders in our National Parks and Monuments. Unfortunately, not much of this until Day 33. We like to see major cities - and also those you just hear about your whole life. State Capitals and their Capitol buildings. (BTW, did you know the cities end in ...tals and the buildings end in ...tols. Capitals vs Capitols. Who knew?) Historic cities are always good, along with historic sites, battlefields and museums. Important infrastructure, including dams, bridges, buildings and major sports stadiums & ballparks. Presidential Libraries are fun, along with estates of the rich and famous. Anything kitchy and anything still standing from the mid-twentieth century. There's a lot to see.
I usually do a multi-post thread all at once. This thread will have
17 posts, but I will just post them as I go along. A thread like this takes hundreds of hours to put together. It might take a couple days to get all posts up. Keep checking back.
Hwy 212 Beartooth Pass, Wyoming (Day 33)
There will be over 1,200 pictures. Obviously, they mean something to me, but hopefully I also chose pictures that could be interesting to anyone. There is a lot of America to see here, but it is still only a couple of thin slices down the roads we travelled. I don't like blurry pictures. I don't like cock-eyed pictures, so every picture is edited by leveling the horizon, cropping out useless pixels until just the good stuff is left. I don't like washed out pictures that are too sunny or those that are too much in the shadow. If I can't fix it, it don't make it - although, there are a few questionable ones that snuck in. My wife gets into the action, too. All of her pictures have a little yellow dot on the lower right corner. That being said, this thread is still just the photos and musings of an amateur photographer / road trip driver. I hope you enjoy it. If it is too wordy, just scroll to the next picture.
Post 1 of 17 follows. It will take some time to get everything up, so keep coming back.