Ever gone Road Tripping?
I've been on three major ones...
#1 Spring Break in high school, me and three buddies piled into a 85 Mustang and drove from Minnesota to Oregon and California and then back in 10 days! It was one of those coming of age times of my life.
Disasters
I'm 6'4", sadly I was not the tallest guy on the trip so I had to cram into the back seat, the whole friggin time.
We piled all of our gear in motorcycle trailer, the tire blew up in the middle of North Dakota. We then spent almost a full day trying to find a spare. We found the exact tire on a toy tractor at a John Deere dealership, the dude wouldn't sell it to us, so we rigged something up with a wheel barrow tire. That got us to the middle of Montana where
The whole axle disintigrated on the trailer. Being dumb high school kids we didn't think about one tire being smaller than the other so we had to abandon the trailer on the side of the interstate and go back into Glendive, MT and buy a whole new trailer. We tied the old one on top of the new one.
While we were in Glendive we gassed up and headed out, forgetting to pay for the gas and proceeded to get pulled over. The cop was pretty understanding and made us go back and pay, it was an honest mistake
In Oregon we wanted to go see Crater Lake, heard it was gorgeous yadda yadda so we took the highway from the Interstate to the Park. Turns out a logging truck tipped over and the whole highway was blocked, so we decided to go off on a logging trail and camp. Well, being in Oregon in the spring means that it usually is pretty wet, yep it started pouring in the middle of the night so we packed up and drove into the next town past the logging road exit and slept in the car overnight
Well, we made it up to Crater Lake that morning and come to find out that they get ungodly amounts of snow (like 100 feet plus) and the snow banks were well above 12' still. All access to the park was pretty much closed so we couldn't go even see the lake.
So, we decided we wanted to see Redwoods. And for some still unknown reason we didn't want to go to the Redwood National Park instead we headed toward Eureka, CA from the main interstate. I am not sure what highway this is but it is listed as National Scenic Highway cutting through some pretty cool mountains on the way to HWY 1 on the coast. It took us a good 12 hours to wind our way within an hour of Eureka when we get to a point where a huge sign says, road closed due to landslide. It was like 9PM and the people said that during the course of the day the landslide happened, you could go back to the interstate (12 hours) or try one of the side roads. It was dark, we were from flatland, tired and wanted to get to Eureka, so we elected to go for the side road. This was one of the scariest trips of my life as it hugged mountain sides with what looked like frequent landslides with no real guardrails on almost sheer cliffs. We did make it into Eureka, at like 6 AM the next day. It was a bad couple of days.
So we got to the ocean and Eureka (never really saw the Redwoods?) and screwed around there and realized we had to get home in like 3 days for school. So that afternoon we took the Mustang out on the beach and proceeded to we believe blow out one of the cylinders on the car.
That pretty much limited us to driving no more than 60 MPH the whole way home...and we drove almost straight through because it is a long ass way from California to Minnesota. The whole cylinder thing sucked ass because If I remember it took us almost 24 hours to cross South Dakota and back home which is usually a 10 hour trip.
It was a ton of fun and like I said something I'll never ever forget. We met up with some of our girl friends from High School in Portland (they went to Seattle) and hung out with them. They gave us three tapes (we only brought 3 and all were Guns N' Roses
) some unknown band called Pearl Jam. They also gave us a Nirvana tape who I was pretty familiar with having hung out with the Stoners in the back of the gorcery store we all worked at. The first time I really got drunk, the first time I was away from home on my own, the first time seeing the Pacific Ocean...it will always be one of the best times of my life and I won't ever forget what I saw, who I was with and what I did. It was great.
More later
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