We’re off to see the country today. It’s day one of our adventure and it’s a bit overwhelming to think that we’re actually doing this. Our parents are brave, trusting, and possibly very wrong to release us into the wild.
I met Andrew, his parents, and Alex at Kaldi’s this morning to get the first cup of coffee for the trip. Yirgacheffe was brewing, I took it to be a good omen. When we were talking I realized how insane the trip was actually going to be. We said our farewells and Alex’s body language said everything that we needed to know, he’d give anything to go. It was a bittersweet moment saying goodbye to him, but we were ecstatic at the same time.
It turns out Missouri is fairly dreadful to drive through. You just have to make the best of it and keep yourself occupied I guess. Music has been a pretty big part so far. Highway of Endless Dreams was the first song, then of course Born To Be Wild. We played the alphabet game (picking an artist starting with ‘A” and the next person has “B”, etc.) so the music selection stays interesting.
In Columbia we stopped to check out Shakespeare’s Pizza but ended up at Which Wich? instead. After lunch we were back on the road, for a long time too, about 600 miles. Despite the bad rap that Kansas gets, it has some redeeming qualities. The rolling plains and windmills are pretty nice to look at, and then there’s grass too, and some cows, and clouds. Ok Kansas is boring, whatever, we got over it.
Around 11:00 we got into Limón, Colorado. We had Starbucks eyes and we were determined to find a place to sleep as quickly as possible. It was too late to find a campground and the TBA boys aren’t about to pay for a hotel, so we decided to pick a small road to go down and just camp on the side of the road. We headed down 71 South only to find a sign welcoming us to the state penitentiary on the left. Needless to say we didn’t sleep next to the prison. We went north and found a place to park. We hopped a barbed-wire fence and threw down our sleeping bags and foamies in a ravine. The stars were our and Andrew got a picture of the night sky. In the morning we woke up and realized we had slept in a pasture. A lazy group of cows grunted at us about 50 meters away. In retrospect, it was a pretty sketchy night. But hey, everything turned out alright. I’m not worried about it, are you?
-Matt
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