The Collected Big Road Trip Posts

A bit of housekeeping. Here, collected in one place are the links out to the various photoblog posts for this summer's Big Road Trip:

Out-of-office doggerel
Day Zero - The Dream Cruise
Days One through Three (Chicago, South Dakota)
Inside the Jaguar
Days Four and Five (Jewel Cave, Devil's Tower, Wyoming)
Day Six (Hot Springs State Park in Wyoming)
Yellowstone - Setting up Camp and Old Faithful
The Big Road Trip: Yellowstone - A Walk along the Upper Geyser Basin
Day Seven, Yellowstone Afternoon (Paint Pots, canyon, grizzly, elk)
Sunday in Yellowstone (bison, Mammoth Hot Springs, black bear)
Sunset in the Grand Tetons
Day Nine - A Drive Through the Rockies
Final Stop - A Visit with Babs at Lake Lotawana, Missouri


And here's a picture of Big Smoky photobombing the Grand Tetons. Just because.

The Big Road Trip: Out-of-office doggerel

I had to update my out-of-office message at work today, and came across the wee poem I left to greet my many e-mail correspondents when I departed on The Big Road Trip. I kinda like it, so I reckoned I'd share it here:


I'm camping with the grizzly bears,
and prairie dogs with squinty stares.
Perhaps I'll see a rabbit, jack.
I'll let you know when I get back.

The Big Road Trip: Final Stop - A Visit with Babs at Lake Lotawana, Missouri

Our last major stop on The Big Road Trip would be a visit with Monique's sister Babs in Lake Lotawana, Missouri, a lake just a bit east of Kansas City. To get there, though, we had a long day of driving across Eastern Colorado and all of Kansas. We didn't take any pictures of the drive, so you'll have to put up with a bit of actual text narrative to fill in that 10-hour gap.

We spent the day listening to a big swath of the audiobook we listened to throughout this trip: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. If you haven't read it, it's a novel about a cattle drive from the Rio Grande River on the Mexican border all the way to Montana. It was a great selection for this trip. Not only is it a great, sprawling novel, but it sprawls across the Great Plains, so we often found ourselves crossing places and rivers shortly before or after they were mentioned in the book.

We also saw a lot of wind farms in this drive, and in retrospect I regret not having taken a few photos of them. We noticed a lot of windmills in Minnesota and South Dakota, but the stretch of I-70 between Denver and Kansas City had the heaviest population of wind farms that I think I've seen anywhere in America. The last time I drove that stretch all there was to look at was grass and farms. Now it's grass, farms, and windmills. All the windmills that have sprung up make a big difference in the landscape. At some level I missed the big, wide-open featureless flat expanses. But all-in-all I prefer having the clean energy of the windmill-scape to the sheer vastness of the empty plain. 

Eventually our audiobooking and windmill watching got us across the plains and to Babs's house in time for dinner on Wednesday night. After dinner, there was a bit of late night swimming...

Those shadowy figures up there in dark. Is it Batman and Robin? 

Nope. It's Malcolm and Henry, night-jumping off Babs's boathouse.

Our view of things improved considerably the next day once the sun came up. The thing that was most immediately apparent to us is how much work and improvement she and her housemate Amy have put into their gardens since our last visit. Here's a quick tour around their lot:

The hill down to the boathouse.

The lakeside patio.

The streetside yard.

We all had a great, relaxing day at Babs's place. Henry and Malcolm took full advantage of the opportunity to do some water skiing

Babs, Henry, and Malcolm.

Monique went along for the ride.

Henry skiing.

Henry.

Malcolm skiing.

In the afternoon Kobe (Henry and Malcolm's cousin, Babs's grandson) came over and Kobe, Henry, and Malcolm embarked on a long session of jumping off the boathouse:

Here are all three in frame at once:

We had a really nice dinner with everybody, including Hillery (Babs's daughter, Monique's niece, Kobe's mom) who came over after she got out of work. But I don't seem to have any photos of that. So instead, we move on to the post-dinner tubing expedition.

Henry and Kobe.

Henry and Malcolm.

I would like to point out that when we started The Big Road Trip I was clean-shaven and had a full head of long, dark brown hair. This sort of expedition can age a fellow.

Kobe and the girl who lives next door to Babs. (Alas, that I've momentarily forgotten her name.)

Henry and Malcolm.

Your humble author claiming a well-earned float in the lake with a beer.

It wasn't all lazing about the lake. I took advantage of the quiet afternoon to take Big Smoky out for a well-earned car wash, a bit of maintenance, and a full tank of gas: premium, naturally. Big Smoky is a Jaguar after all, and Jaguars have expensive tastes.

With Big Smoky cleaned and packed we hit the road Friday morning for the final day of driving, another long stretch from Kansas City to Detroit.

I present to you a drive-by photo of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis from far off:

The tragedy here is that we took a wrong turn in St. Louis, left the highway, and drove around the arch three times before finding our way back on the highway. But I never thought to pull out the camera,even thought we were so close to its base that I had to open the sunroof just so that we could see it overhead. Ten days of snapshots had obviously dulled my reflexes.

And then, just like that (well, after another fourteen or so hours of driving) we were back in our very own driveway in Wolverine Lake:

There, and back again: 4,409.9 miles in the Jaguar XJ8 Vanden Plas Supercharged Saloon -- plus another 300 or so in my brother's SUV, which we drove from Casper up to Thermopolis and back. That's nearly 5,000 miles of driving in ten days.

It's good to be home:

We saw a lot of views on this trip, but the one from my porch compares nicely with the best of 'em.

Final photo: your intrepid photographers. Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.

The Big Road Trip: Day Nine - A Drive Through the Rockies

We awoke Day Nine at the Baymont Inn in Pinedale, Wyoming. Naturally, Henry and Malcolm continued their intensive survey of motel pools and hot tubs:

Monique was the true genius of our stop in Pinedale. She realized that with the camping legs of our trip done we could ship the sleeping bags and pads back to Michigan. Suddenly, the spacious backseat of the Jaguar XJ8 Vanden Plas Supercharged Saloon was spacious again!

After the swim and breakfast we hit the road for one of our longer legs of the trip. Come along for the drive. Our itinerary takes us from Western Wyoming through the Rockies to Denver, then to points east:

By the time we hit mid-central Colorado we started to climb into the mountains. We went up:

And up.

And up.

And up.

And up and up and up into the foothills of the Rockies.

At this point I had begun to lose hope for a good drive along Trail Ridge Road through Rocky Mountain National Park because of the dark clouds and rain that had gathered in the mountains. Trail Ridge Road is generally considered one of America's most scenic drives. It rises high above the timber line in the park -- all the way up to a high point of 12,183 feet, more than two miles above sea level -- and provides sweeping views from its many curves.

But the weather ahead looked like it would be a washout for us. Nonetheless, we drove on:

At the base of the park we hit the three-lakes area near Grand Lake:

Then, as we headed up, up, up into the park itself, the clouds broke right in the area we hoped to drive.

Here's a photo of Big Smoky at one of the best overlooks, with its view back across the valley with Big Timber Creek and the North Branch of the Colorado River.

Yes, it's true. My beautiful, elegant Jaguar XJ8 Vanden Plas Supercharged Saloon has officially been nicknamed "Big Smoky." This may come as a shock to some of you, but it turns out that my fifteen-year-old Jaguar burns quite a bit of oil -- especially after long runs and at higher altitudes. Mostly, this just led to a mildly embarrassing but harmless cloud of blue smoke for a few miles as we pulled out of motel parking lots and hit the highway.

But here we had parked for a bit at high altitude after one of our longer runs of the trip. This led to our most mortifying Big Smoky moment of the trip. We started up again just as another group stepped out of their car to enjoy the view. Unfortunately, there soon was no view as they were enveloped in the biggest smoke cloud of the trip.

Um, sorry, fellow sightseers. I really do regret that one.

A little further along the road we came across a herd of elk grazing on a hill:

Soon we found ourselves up above the timber line and among the glaciers. The pace of the photos slows quite a bit at this point. After we cleared the timber line chief Trail Ridge Road photographer Monique quickly decided that she'd had enough of the view because it involved few guardrails but lots of catastrophic-looking dropoffs two feet from the passenger's window:

At one point we looped around a curve to see two elk fighting on the hillside behind us.

After a long time among the glaciers the road began to head back down:

Another elk, this one resting at roadside!

Just about the time we hit the valley floor the setting sun disappeared for good and the rain started again, this time in earnest. We were unbelievably grateful to have hit a hole in the rain just when we drove through Rocky Mountain National Park.

Once we left the park a couple of dark, damp hours of driving brought us to Denver. We parked downtown near Union Station, walked around a bit, and had an entirely delicious dinner at a P.F. Chang's:

After dinner we continued our nighttime stroll in downtown Denver. We walked over to one of the most important destinations of the trip for our basketball enthusiasts, the Pepsi Center, home of the NBA's Denver Nuggets:

... and then ... yup, back in the car for a couple more hours of driving. We finally stopped for the night at a motel somewhere off I-70 in Central Colorado.

Next destination: Lake Lotawana, Missouri, for a visit with Monique's sister Babs.