Welcome back fellow travelers for another trip. Utah is THE state to see landforms. In 2013 when traveling through Utah I was able to enjoy Zion National Park but Bryce was fogged in. There’s a lot more to see in Utah, even more than I then realized. So here’s the plan. Departing today, Monday, March 21, 2016, driving west to Colorado and Utah. A couple national parks in Colorado and then looping around southern Utah to see several national parks and monuments. Dipping down into Arizona and then traveling east back through Colorado for another park. Driving east across the breadth of Texas to Louisiana to enjoy some Cajun and Zydeco music and Cajun and Creole food. Then up the Natchez Trace Parkway (Natchez, MS to Nashville, TN), a run up the Ohio River valley and then north back to northeast Ohio. More on all this later.
Should take about three weeks. Not as ambitious as last year’s trip to Alaska (please see peeweesbigadventure.wordpress.com) but a fair journey for sure. I had a vague notion to do this trip for some time now and recently intended to depart just after Easter. That would put me on the road after spring break season. Now quickly deciding to leave earlier to accommodate family schedules. Notwithstanding spring breaks, the nice thing is this time of year is short of ‘high season’. Lodging will be easier on the pocketbook and many of the summertime turista peeps will still be at home. Downside is that it’ll be a lot cooler than the summer; I’d reckon that the top of my jitney will be more up than down.
Anyway it should be fun and exciting, at least after driving through the rather boring corn-growing landscape of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Nebraska. Going west, the mountains start in central Colorado and at that point the drive becomes more challenging and fun, plus the vistas become impressive. So buckle into shotgun and let’s enjoy this drive together. We’ll be talking a lot more, on down the road. Here’s a teaser.
Pete's Big Adventure 
Pops,
God speed, I look forward to this trip!!
Matt
Cheers Matt. I knew you’d be right here by my side.
Jakob here getting caught up today.
Jakob, so happy to see you’re getting caught up and reading my blog. I know you like adventure stories and this is certainly one. Stay with me now buddy. Pops
Oh wow that sounds great and you have a beautiful picture of Bryce posted here. Too bad it was fogged in.
I love the picture at the top of the blog too, the tree lined road
Hello Shelene. Ah, I’m glad to see you’re here in the blog. It’s sort of like riding shotgun with me in my two-seater. Enjoy the ride and on the way check out what John Muir said about all this wonder of nature. Two of his quotes among my favorites:
Standing here, with facts so fresh and telling and held up so vividly before us, every seeing observer, not to say geologist, must readily apprehend the earth-sculpturing, landscape-making action of flowing ice. And here, too, one learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes; that moraine soil is being ground and outspread for coming plants,–coarse boulders and gravel for forests, finer soil for grasses and flowers,–while the finest part of the grist, seen hastening out to sea in the draining streams, is being stored away in darkness and builded particle on particle, cementing and crystallizing, to make the mountains and valleys and plains of other predestined landscapes, to be followed by still others in endless rhythm and beauty.
John Muir, Travels in Alaska, Chapter V, A Cruise in the Cassiar
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 438.