3 brown guys, a tent and a rental car

Actually a lot more...but that summarizes the essential members of my 5000 mile, 10 day roadtrip. Crazy idea, made crazier still by the fact that gas hovered around 3 dollars to the gallon through the trip. It is tough to put in words the sights seen, things done and not done, experiences and discoveries. I wish I had enough pictures to speak the unspoken words..but my camera decided to quit on me a day before the trip and I was left with a point and shoot with a 50 photo limit on battery and memory. Oh well, at least that made me stop and soak in the sights rather than capture them using second rate photography skills! Anyway, here is my meager photo album. I hope to add links to my co-travelers' more considerable albums soon.

The first thing you discover while road tripping through the Midwest and the great plains of the US is the sheer size, beauty and variety of this country. Places you have flown over while coast hopping become real asphalt and scenery experiences. Within a day's drive you go from cornfields to desolate wastelands to evergreen forests. The second thing you discover is how much of an intruder you and I are. It is almost as if man is an aberration in a sea of land, crisscrossing rivers and rivers of concrete that somehow seem to just blend into the mountainsides. If you leave out the small townships that occasionally crop out of nowhere to provide you with gas and food, there is an overpowering feeling of emptiness. Not in a negative way. For, paraphrasing Tolstoy, all populated areas are alike, it is only the empty and desolate ones that differ from each other in their emptiness.

While traveling by interstates and state roads for an extended period, you begin to appreciate a few realities; the importance of having a non T-mobile cell phone, how good a hot shower feels, how good it is to have a large vehicle with enough room to store all your stuff, that there are more stars in the night sky than you can count, that remaining unconnected for a week fills your inbox but frees your mind...

In the coming days, I shall try to add some details of few of the places I visited and what made them unique/interesting.