Hello and welcome. This blog is for those of you who would like to take that great American road trip from east to west, north to south or anywhere in between, but haven’t yet – Those of you who think you never will ( but you might) or would like to but are a bit daunted by it – Those of you in the east who have never been west, the west who have never been east, the north…. etc.
Over the past three years my partner and I have driven across the continent 5 times. I will be giving helpful information about prices, places to visit etc., but mostly I will be describing the inspiration of it all – the beautiful scenery and incredible changes in landscape, and the details about places that make them different from where you are right now. I hope to make it interesting and most of all to inspire you to take your own road trip or even to contribute thoughts or facts from one you have already enjoyed.
But first a little history about me and how I eventually arrived at this blog. I am female, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and as for most Nova Scotians no matter where they live, Halifax is still home for me even when I live elsewhere.
I am an artist who usually has to take other jobs to earn a living. My website is here: www.artcollage.etsy.com
When I was young, we moved away from Halifax to Ontario. Every summer my dad, being a road trip lover himself and also a true Haligonian who needed to go home at every available opportunity, would pack all 4 of us and my mom in the Oldsmobile or the Ford and drive us the 1000 miles back home. Sometimes we took the Canadian route, but more often the American route, through upper New York State, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. We just loved it. I don’t know how he afforded it, but we stayed at motels and cabins (I still remember those cute little cabins in the Catskills!) and we ate at restaurants and fast food places – Howard Johnsons was our favorite. Kids don’t really remember the scenery so much, just the experiences, like going to Santa’s village and Frontier town in New York State, ordering a brown cow at Howard Johnsons and watching heads turn as the huge mountain of ice cream and chocolate is brought across the room and placed in front of a scrawny 10 year old, embarrassed at all the attention. Anyway, my point is, this is where my wanderlust began.
Up until about 8 years ago my travelling focus was on Europe. People around me were taking inclusive holidays to exotic locations, but all I was interested in was the rich cultural experience of European travel. Then one day, looking for a new business idea to support my artistic endeavours, I went to a small business / franchise show and was drawn like a magnet to a ‘sell travel at home’ booth. (Don’t worry I don’t sell travel) The selling travel thing never did work out for me (although it has for other people, don’t get me wrong). However – I ended up on a plane to Las Vegas on my way to a training conference. I didn’t want to go to Las Vegas. I wished it was in London or Paris or at least Bermuda. I don’t have much tolerance for heat, and I burn easily, so I didn’t have the same desire as others to go somewhere hot and lie in the sun. I like to drop $20 at the casino as much as anyone, but I’m not a gambler and I thought Las Vegas was tacky. Anyway, I had to take the training, so Las Vegas it was.
We left Halifax in the middle of and ice storm in mid March. It was iffy even to get to the airport, never mind flying anywhere. But somehow, after at least an hour of de-icing, we managed to take off. All I remember about the flight was flying over miles and miles of brown mountains and plains – scenery I had never seen before. We landed in Las Vegas on a gentle sunny afternoon. Even the light breeze felt calming after the weather we had left behind.
My Las Vegas trip is when I first learned why people go on warm weather holidays – I also learned that it spoils you for life. It’s not the heat (well, it is – up to about 78 F for me). It’s really about the sun – and the light – and the soft air. I had come to a place with virtually no ‘weather’. The woman from the travel company who booked our flight was from Georgia – she was worried about us having to walk two blocks for the first few days from our cheaper hotel to the Flamingo for our meetings. She thought, since it was March, it might be a bit windy or cold. Well….. not to someone who would normally be standing in freezing slush, shoveling the heavy wet snow out of their driveway at that time of year! I had lived all my life in places that have real seasons. Most of the time in places with, lets face it, 5-6 months of winter. And in Nova Scotia anyway, a summer that could be half filled with rainy days – and half filled with glorious ones too, and that’s the dangling carrot that keeps us living in those harsh climes.
So even though I knew the weather was different in other places, I had never experienced how it felt until then – and no one ever really described it to me. That is partly why I am writing this blog. Everywhere I have travelled there have been small and larger things about the place that I had never heard about before. Travel articles tell you about hotels, restaurants, sightseeing, but leave out what sometimes is the most fascinating information – the details of what life is like in a place, how it feels to be there. That is what I hope to convey in this blog, along with practical information as well, of course.
I thoroughly enjoyed Las Vegas (for more about that trip, see the Trips / Places menu to the right.) but the Grand Canyon blew me away. We managed to have a couple of free days before our training, sowe hopped on a bus for a 5 hour journey there and a 5 hour journey back – but it was worth it. We drove through mainly brown rocky and hilly landscape right out of a cowboy movie. Technically it should be called barren, but it seemed beautiful to me, like an ocean is beautiful- big sky and openness. I really wanted to get off the bus and hike over the landscape to examine the desert plants closer up and see what was out there over the next hill. |Unfortunately, bus tours don’t allow for that kind of spontaneity.
Eventually we entered Grand Canyon National Park where the scenery was sparse pine forest. It reminded me of the yogi bear cartoons from childhood. Not what I expected after all the brown rocky landscape beforehand. Since we came in from Tusayan to the south, we had no visuals as we approached. The bus pulled up beside some of the buildings in Grand Canyon Village. We disembarked and the driver showed us where to walk between two buildings toward the rim as we still could not see anything.
Twenty steps later it opened up before us in jaw dropping beauty, silent and sublime. The colours and the sense of space were amazing. What I found incongruous was the fact that even here, up high on the edge of plateau lands before a gigantic cliff and open space, the air was so gentle and still. Where I come from, if you are somewhere like that – it is at least a bit windy and a nippy. I guess it’s not always that gentle by the canyon. We must have been lucky with the weather for March? The spring colours were varied and rich. There were soft greens and mauves along with the more usual ochre and terracotta. I have been there since, in June when the colours were hotter and more monotone.
We had about an hour and a half before we had to be back at the bus – hardly adequate, but a fact. Aside from a brief look in the gift store, I just picked different vantage points and tried to imprint the feeling in my memory. I took lots of pictures too.
So this is how I fell in love with the west – and I must admit it, to escaping winter weather if at all possible! It also reawakened the wanderlust in me – the pure enjoyment of seeing new places and the trick of how they are almost never quite what you expect them to be.
Have Van, Will Travel 