Trip 13?? What happened to the rest of Trip 10 and all of Trips 11 and 12?
In short, I got busy. And lazy. Maybe more toward lazy!!! The trips have been further apart than the pace I had kept for the first 10 trips, but I hope to get back to taking a trip every two or so months. Meanwhile, I do have my notes from the missing trips, so maybe one day I will get caught up. For now, the lofty goal is to try to keep up with my future trips.
As a recap, my last blog was at the start of Trip 10, a trip which covered most of Colorado and a little Utah and New Mexico. It was a great trip and I will try to get the website updated soon with comments. Last October, I took Trip 11, which took me up to southwestern Pennsylvania, then back down the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Smoky Mountains. It included a solemn moment as I stopped at the Flight 93 Memorial.
Trip 12 was a shorter one, taken last January, and was based out of Las Vegas. One advantage to all of my travelling is that I’m in every frequent stayer program. Hilton gave me an offer of three free nights in Vegas in exchange for sitting through a one-hour timeshare presentation (no, I didn’t buy). I used the next few free days to visit nearby sites, then headed across southern California to San Diego.
That brings us to Trip 13. As for why there is over a four-month gap between Trip 12 and Trip 13, that was my recovery time! In March, I had my right knee replaced, and recovery was slower than hoped. I finally was walking without assistance a few weeks ago, and drove a car in early May for the first time in 6 weeks. I still limp a bit, and the knee will ache if I do too much, but I’m ready to get on the road again.
I will have company for this trip. My daughter, on hopefully her last summer break from college, flew down a few weeks ago and has been visiting her grandmother (and me sometimes). Originally, we were going to drive back to her home in Des Moines, then I would head out across the northern plains on my trip. However, she came up with the idea of “helping me drive”, so she will join me for the trip which will now end in Des Moines. After a few days there, I’ll head back to Florida by myself.
This is a pretty ambitious trip and will cover over 7,000 miles. There are at least three sites dedicated to fossil beds – which my daughter will enjoy as an anthropology major. We will also check out a couple of scenic rivers, several forts, a cave, a couple of battlefields, Glacier National Park, and the spot where the “Golden Spike”, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by railroad, was driven home.
In all, I will knock off another twenty sites on this trip, bringing my total to 168. It will approach 200 in September when I visit the Washington DC area (Wyndham hotels offered a similar deal to Hiltons). Because there are so many NPS sites concentrated in the mall area of Washington, I can knock out 10 parks in a 3.5 mile loop walk. Several other sites offer the ability to visit several in a day, so I will hope to visit 27 locations while there.
Meanwhile, we will see how well I do with keeping the blog entries for this trip current. Since we are leaving from Florida, the first few days will just be long, driving days, until we reach the Missouri River along the Nebraska/South Dakota border.
Steve
