The great 2016 road trip, part 1
Sep. 1st, 2020 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellTechnically, the SO drove to Orlando and back. I just handled navigation.
The idea formed in our collective mind sometime during the winter of 2015-2016, when the SO suggested that driving to the opposite corner of the country might actually be more pleasant than flying, and then it struck me as a fun challenge, and so neither of us ever tried talking the other out of the idea.
I changed jobs in the spring of 2016, but the new place let people work holidays and take a different day off instead, so between saving up my holidays and my pro-rated number of vacation days for 2/3 of year, I was able to put together enough days off to take two and a half weeks in September.
In trying to come up with a suitable analogy for how far we'd be travelling for my co-worker in the next office, who had recently arrived from the UK, I learned that Portland to Orlando is about the same straight-line distance as London to Baghdad. Except we did not go in a straight line...
Day 1: We set out and immediately turned back after a couple blocks because I'd forgotten to grab my jacket. I didn't need it until the last day of the trip.
US 26 is our usual route into Portland, where can pick up I-84. This heads up the Columbia River Gorge, for some of the best scenery you can get in the whole interstate freeway system. East of the Cascades, on the dry side of the state, it eventually turns southeast into mountainous terrain and picks up the Snake River along the Idaho border.
That got us across the first time zone border of the trip. We kept going as far as Twin Falls, Idaho, where we stopped for dinner, then both admitted to each other that we felt tired and so I found us a room there for the night. (I had reservations in Orlando, but nothing en route, as a guard against get-there-itis.)
Day 2: Feeling much better, and agreeing that how we felt the previous night was probably due to the adjustment to the dry air and altitude of the high desert, we set off on I-84 again, heading into Utah. Eastern Idaho is where things become spectacularly flat. The particularly flat and empty stretch before Utah has my favorite traffic warning signs of all time, which read:
OCCASIONAL
BLINDING
DUST STORMS
They're equipped with lights, which seem pointless as (a) you would probably notice if the blinding dust storm was happening and (b) by definition, wouldn't they be unseeable in a blinding dust storm?
There is also something amusing to me about being warned by signs with the same visual tone as the ones about, say, cattle grids in the road.
I-84 eventually dead-ends into I-15, which we followed south of Salt Lake City and Provo into brand new territory for either of us. We turned off at US 6 to US 191, where we had our first of two exciting near-accidents on this trip. US 191 split off directly onto a steep hill, and traffic jockeying for position there included a log truck whose driver was determined to preserve their momentum heading up the hill and wasn't yielding to anyone. We were nearly pinched between that and other traffic but it all somehow sorted itself out at the last moment.
Heading down through Green River and Moab, we passed a lot of camper trailers. Moab I recall as one big traffic jam in the middle of nowhere. It's one of those towns where the highway becomes the main street with all the shops on it, and the place was packed.
We jogged east again at Monticello, onto US 491, cutting through a corner of Colorado. Along there, we saw our first Trump sign. One of the reasons we'd wound up taking this trip when we did was a feeling that the general US political situation was only going to get nastier as the election approached and would probably not improve for a while no matter who won.
Turning south again, there was another impressively flat stretch heading down through Navajo territory. As evening fell, we could see the lights of Shiprock, where we would turn onto US 64, for easily an hour before we actually got there.
We stopped for the night in Farmington, the biggest town we'd seen in hours.
Next time: Taking that left turn at Albuquerque
The idea formed in our collective mind sometime during the winter of 2015-2016, when the SO suggested that driving to the opposite corner of the country might actually be more pleasant than flying, and then it struck me as a fun challenge, and so neither of us ever tried talking the other out of the idea.
I changed jobs in the spring of 2016, but the new place let people work holidays and take a different day off instead, so between saving up my holidays and my pro-rated number of vacation days for 2/3 of year, I was able to put together enough days off to take two and a half weeks in September.
In trying to come up with a suitable analogy for how far we'd be travelling for my co-worker in the next office, who had recently arrived from the UK, I learned that Portland to Orlando is about the same straight-line distance as London to Baghdad. Except we did not go in a straight line...
Day 1: We set out and immediately turned back after a couple blocks because I'd forgotten to grab my jacket. I didn't need it until the last day of the trip.
US 26 is our usual route into Portland, where can pick up I-84. This heads up the Columbia River Gorge, for some of the best scenery you can get in the whole interstate freeway system. East of the Cascades, on the dry side of the state, it eventually turns southeast into mountainous terrain and picks up the Snake River along the Idaho border.
That got us across the first time zone border of the trip. We kept going as far as Twin Falls, Idaho, where we stopped for dinner, then both admitted to each other that we felt tired and so I found us a room there for the night. (I had reservations in Orlando, but nothing en route, as a guard against get-there-itis.)
Day 2: Feeling much better, and agreeing that how we felt the previous night was probably due to the adjustment to the dry air and altitude of the high desert, we set off on I-84 again, heading into Utah. Eastern Idaho is where things become spectacularly flat. The particularly flat and empty stretch before Utah has my favorite traffic warning signs of all time, which read:
OCCASIONAL
BLINDING
DUST STORMS
They're equipped with lights, which seem pointless as (a) you would probably notice if the blinding dust storm was happening and (b) by definition, wouldn't they be unseeable in a blinding dust storm?
There is also something amusing to me about being warned by signs with the same visual tone as the ones about, say, cattle grids in the road.
I-84 eventually dead-ends into I-15, which we followed south of Salt Lake City and Provo into brand new territory for either of us. We turned off at US 6 to US 191, where we had our first of two exciting near-accidents on this trip. US 191 split off directly onto a steep hill, and traffic jockeying for position there included a log truck whose driver was determined to preserve their momentum heading up the hill and wasn't yielding to anyone. We were nearly pinched between that and other traffic but it all somehow sorted itself out at the last moment.
Heading down through Green River and Moab, we passed a lot of camper trailers. Moab I recall as one big traffic jam in the middle of nowhere. It's one of those towns where the highway becomes the main street with all the shops on it, and the place was packed.
We jogged east again at Monticello, onto US 491, cutting through a corner of Colorado. Along there, we saw our first Trump sign. One of the reasons we'd wound up taking this trip when we did was a feeling that the general US political situation was only going to get nastier as the election approached and would probably not improve for a while no matter who won.
Turning south again, there was another impressively flat stretch heading down through Navajo territory. As evening fell, we could see the lights of Shiprock, where we would turn onto US 64, for easily an hour before we actually got there.
We stopped for the night in Farmington, the biggest town we'd seen in hours.
Next time: Taking that left turn at Albuquerque
