Playing Catch-up

Dear faithful reader,

As you may have noticed, we are not really "caught up" on the blog as compared to real life. Our map shows us in San Diego and LA, while the last post of note left us on the doorstep of Big Bend National Park. Have no fear! We fully intend to provided you with detailed blow-by-blow accounts of our activities. But for now, here's a brief outline of our recent activities:

Big Bend National Park
Potentially one of the most out-of-the-way national parks in the country, Big Bend offered a peaceful respite in the wilderness in the midst of some pretty hectic driving days. We spent our first night in a backcountry car campsite (oxymoron? it turns out they actually exist!) pretty much in the middle of the desert, with no one around for miles. The next day, we got a small taste of the desert when we hiked to a gigantic balanced rock, precariously perched on two other equally massive boulders. We ran into a retired couple from North Dakota who turned out to be much friendlier than they at first appeared. The hike left us dusty, hot, and a little tired, so we moved camp up to the mountains and hung out in the established campground cradled by the impressive peaks of the Chisos range. It was a little weird going from having no one around to being surrounded by RVs and retirees, but what can you do.

The following morning, we woke up extra early, packed our daypacks, and set out on a 12+ mile hike up to and along the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains. The hike was absolutely spectacular, and we were treated with perfect weather. The views of the Chisos Basin (where the campground is located) on the way up to the ridge were stunning, but we were wholly unprepared by the sheer grandeur of the view that met us at our lunch spot. Julia and Sara were ahead; Annie, Tara, and Rachel were a little farther behind. As the last three approached a trail junction, they noticed they were about to crest a rise in the hillside. The sky opened in front of them, and there were Sara and Julia sitting on a ledge overlooking fifty miles of desert flats, the Rio Grande, and Mexican mountains. Perigrine falcons and other birds surfed the thermals wafting up along the face of the immense cliff atop which we lunched. It was stunning, to say the least.

That night, those unwashed members of the troupe were treated to a glorious sunset seen through the notch in the range surrounding the Basin (see picture in previous post). We ate a hodge podge dinner of scrambled eggs, pancakes, Ramen noodles, and cereal as our sore muscles protested most positions we asked them to assume.

The Coldest Night
We realized that Big Bend to Vegas was quite a ridiculous trip to make in one day, so we decided to split it up and camp somewhere in New Mexico. At the previously mentioned rest area, we realized that we could press on to a much farther campsite, thus cutting the driving hours of the following day. What we didn't realize, however, was that pushing forward meant going higher. So when we were about 20 minutes away from our campground (Bluewater Lake State Park, about 40 miles east of Gallup, NM), and Tara radioed to Annie, Rachel, and Julia to "Guess the temperature," Annie replied, "45."

Tara: "Lower."
Rachel: "37?"
Julia: "34."
Tara: "Lower."
Annie: "27?"
Tara: "Lower."
Rachel, Julia, and Annie: "Crap."
It turned out that Sara's car read 23 degrees outside. And that was at 8pm. There was frozen snow on the ground as we turned into the state park.

We made a plan of attack and were fairly deliberate in our preparations. We camped as close to the bathroom as possible, and while everyone else worked on setting up the tent, Rachel boiled water from the showers to make everyone a hot water bottle for their sleeping bags. We bundled in all of our warm clothes, fished out sleeping bag liners and extra sleeping bags. In fact, we were as prepared as we could hope without having specific winter gear. It was a cold night, and some were definitely colder than others, but we lived to tell the tale.

The next morning we treated ourselves to a delicious breakfast at El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, where Sara ordered "water and hot water," making it clear that the warmth of the tea she actually wanted was all she cared about.

From New Mexico we ventured to Vegas via the Hoover Dam, but more on that later. Rantings on the Hoover Dam deserve their very own post.

Adventurously yours,

Us.

Live Map!

View Larger Map

With this amazing new-fangled technology they call the "Internet," and a portion of it mysteriously named "Google," we are able to bring you a LIVE UPDATING version of the Google Map of our route. Green marks indicate places we've been already, blue markers show where we hope to wind up in the future. Red indicates where we are right now (at least, at the time of the most recent update!).

Visual Aids

We figured it might be a little difficult to visualize all of the cool things we've been seeing, so here's just a taste. More pictures to come!

The first is brand new, a shot of the Colorado River as it empties from the Lake Mead (after passing through the gargantuan Hoover Dam).

The next is the obligatory group shot at the entrance to Big Bend.

The third is the sunset from our second campsite in Big Bend on our last night there.

To Big Bend! (Day 4)

We left Austin under the cover of darkness, just as we had entered (though minus the ridiculous confusing of Sara and Rachel’s arrival). On the road (Rt. 290 W) at 7am, we had already eaten up considerable mileage by mid-morning when we passed through Fredericksburg, which reminded us, as Julia put it, “Of being on a movie set.” The adorable Texan town apparently had been settled by a bunch of Germans, as “eichen” (and other random German words that Rachel didn’t just make up) appeared on more than a couple of street signs, and multiple restaurants advertised “American and German food.” Fredericksburg saw the continuation of Post Office Chicken. The riders in Hank tried to radio to those Liberty and ask for the input of a post office into the more intelligent GPS system, to the consternation of both parties because Hank’s radio would cut out before the message was done. Increased yelling, it turned out, did not increase the ease of comprehension. We put two and two together and switched the batteries. Normal level communication ensued. It took us a couple more rounds of Post Office Chicken to realize that we had run out of small towns along Rt. 290; the interstate was fast approaching. It wasn’t until we were stopped at a Phillips 66 station on I-10 W that genius struck Annie: gas stations receive and send mail too! She ran in with a stack of Netflix DVD’s, postcards, and letters. Annie: 1, Post office: 0.

Since leaving Austin, Rt. 290 and I-10 had proclaimed that we were driving through “Texas Hill Country,” and it was easy to understand why. Every so often, huge cuts in the approaching hills would open and swallow the interstate. The rounded mesa formations were stunning, and offered the most interesting topography since West Virginia. The sheer flatness of our surroundings over the last couple of days made the appearance of these hills even more remarkable. This country significantly differed from the ups, downs, twists, and turns of West Virginia, of course. Here was vast, open sage brush country with no end in sight. No roads crossed the expanse save ours, and the tiny asphalt tracks met the interstate at widely spaced exits with a lonely gas station to mark the occasion. Ranch land lined the edge of the roads, and it wasn’t just any ranch land. Our eyes peeled for legendary longhorn Texas cattle, we were taken by complete surprise when we saw the first band of pygmy goats huddled in the shade. Really? Pygmy goat ranches? There must be a reason Texas is so touchy about people messing with them...

Later, we began to see white toothpicks sticking up from a couple of mesas rising in the distance. Their indistinct forms became recognizable as windmills, and not solitary ones. They stood in shoulder-to-shoulder ranks across the broad mesas, forming vast windfarms that must have covered hundreds, if not thousands, of acres. The night before, Rachel had predicted that the drive across central and western Texas would bring sights of oil rigs pumping the hillsides across gigantic oil fields. It was therefore strangely gratifying to be met first with a vision of such heavy investment in renewable energy, especially in Texas of all places. We did eventually come across some oil rigs slogging away, but nothing to the scale of the new technology that overlooked them from the hilltops.

We stopped in Fort Stockton, a depressing 50s-era National Park gateway town, for groceries and gas. Stocked with food, we headed south towards Big Bend National Park, our first park of the trip.

After 127 miles, we paused to take the requisite park entrance sign photos, and even took one for a Korean family who had stopped behind us. We snaked through agave (century plants) and other species impressively adapted to and thriving in desert life. We detoured briefly to an exhibit describing the Big Bend area of the late-Eocene. We saw fossil replicas of various swamp-style animals, including mini-hippos and the like, as what was now desert had then been a luscious swamp. The exhibit even pointed out the layered gray shale that resulted from the compression of layers of Eocene swamp mud (yes, Rachel took pictures). The short trail led to an incredibly windy promontory, where we experienced a bit of the wind’s erosive scouring power.

We headed to the Panther Junction Visitor’s Center, and talked to a very nice and helpful park ranger who set us up with a backcountry car camping site and some pretty sweet hike ideas. Backcountry permit in hand, we filled every available vessel with water. Even our plastic chicken, which suffered from a condition called “too-many-holes,” saw its fair share of water after receiving a thorough duct tape treatment.

Our campsite was located along the dirt Grapevine Hills road, about 4 miles from pavement. It was smack-dab in the middle of the desert scrub with incredible views of the Chisos Mountains to the south and other highlands to the north. The sun set a bit to the east of the Chisos range, casting a beautiful bruise-colored tint on the haze before the mountains as it dropped below the horizon. An amazing band of cliffs peeked out just above a small rise to the northeast.

Nothing, however, could compare to the stars. The sun’s glow still lingered in the southwestern sky when we could see as many stars as we can see on the darkest night at Echo Hill. As the light faded, more and more appeared out of the darkness, filling in Orion so well that he seemed to don hunting furs as the traveled across the sky. The Milky Way was a majestic wash of light arcing across the sky. We all spent the better part of the night post-dinner and pre-sleep feeling powerless to resist the urge to crane our necks skyward and absorb the sights all around. For the spectacular stars were not merely above us; pricks of light flooded in from all directions. Venus even reflected enough light on its own to brighten a widening arc beneath it towards the horizon, washing out all but a few stars in the vicinity. As we sat in near silence, our patience was treated with shooting star sightings and the Big Dipper’s slow progress as it rose vertically from the horizon, one handle star at a time.

We succumbed to tiredness eventually and reconvened in the tent. As most of us drifted off to sleep, a lonely howl drifted across the open desert. Another howl answered, and soon we could hear yapping back and forth. Apparently a pack of coyotes were celebrating the night sky as well. They are not nearly as eerily haunting as wolves, which we seem to be genetically coded to fear, but coyotes are still just as cool to hear in the wild. They seem so gregarious, yapping and napping at each other like monkeys. Those of us in the tent hoped Sara wasn’t crapping her pants right then, as she was outside by herself.

Of Knees, Strangers, and Mustaches (Day 3)

The third day of the trip started bright and early to the raucous Krrrrr-ing of woodpeckers, busy after who-knows-what insects in the nutall oaks surrounding our campsite. In the light of day, we learned that we had camped right next to the Arkansas state champion nutall oak, a fact proclaimed by a giant sign hidden by the darkness the night before. It was our first morning having slept in our tent, so we took our time breaking down camp. The sky was alive with birds flitting back and forth between trees, swooping over the lake, and chattering back and forth to each other. An overwhelming sense of life surrounded us, different from the snowy frigidness we had gotten used to at Deep Creek Lake, where we started our journey.

One new species greatly impressed itself upon our minds: the cypress tree. They wade in the water like children afraid to fully submerge and stand resolute in their conquest of a very narrow niche. Their knobby knees stick out of the water—allowing the roots to breathe—while the rest of the root plunges into the shallows—anchoring the trunk and sucking nutrients from the murk. Imagine the process whereby an organism would develop such a specific strategy to outsmart encroaching rivers and a crowded water’s edge. Pretty epic.

From Lake Chicot, we drove south into Louisiana (Rachel’s 48^th state!) on rural two-lane roads, by far the best way to explore a region by car. We wound through tiny towns and outposts of mobile homes and what seemed to be crumbling, single-room houses. It was somewhere along these roads that we first started playing “Post Office Chicken,” or the game where we all want to go to a post office, are all looking for a post office, pass said post office a little too quickly, and don’t take the time to stop and turn around. This game continued until we were most of the way through Texas.

We stopped in Shreveport, LA (not “Treeport,” like one unnamed member of our group thought), in order to grab lunch at what we believed was Jerry’s sandwich shop. Jerry’s turned out, in fact, to be Gerald Savoie’s Cajun Restaurant, which was under construction and no longer in business. A little dejected (we were really excited to try one of Wes’s amazing food suggestions; he did, after all, introduce us to Herb’s), we found the nearest supermarket and bought on-sale roast beef and cheddar cheese from the super-nice woman at the deli counter. The veil between shopper and marketer was lifted from Annie’s eyes when she actually saw one of the deli workers announcing the chicken dinner special over the intercom. It was a watershed moment.

Ten minutes later, we munched on delicious sandwiches in the parking lot. A woman took in the scene from her car, and upon parking inquired, “Girl scout troupe or sorority?” We chuckled, and replied that we were neither but in fact simply a group of friends. She must have noticed the Obama and Hillary bumper stickers on Hank the All-American Hybrid’s backside (i.e. the trunk of the Escape), and started confiding in us as if we were long-lost friends. “The people down here just don’t understand. I’m not from here originally; I’m a transplant. I was talking to a lady in my church, and she made a big stink about him going to Harvard, and it was probably because her husband could only get into UT...blah blah blah.” It was pretty incredible. We were still munching away when the same woman returned. Before she left, we learned that her college roommate had gone to Sara’s high school and various other pieces of her biography.

We returned to the road with full bellies and passed into Texas, whose large state sign proclaimed “Home of President George W. Bush.” We laughed and then noted other hilarious Texas novelties: “Don’t Mess with Texas: Up to $1000 Fine for Littering” signs, free Wi-Fi in the rest areas, and a giant gravel mine (well, maybe that wasn’t hilarious—it was bizarre, though).

Our road ended in Austin, at Tara’s friend David’s apartment. We arrived exhausted and a little loopy (Rachel had a particularly steamy reaction to the toll way, confusing mixing bowls of I-35, and the ultimately unhelpful and misleading GPS system). We initially believed we were too tired to take advantage of the Austin scene, but hunger prompted us to action, and we left in search of a 24-hour diner called Kerbey Lane. Apparently a mainstay in local night-owl culture, it offered the wide array of breakfast, Tex-Mex, and vegan/veggie options one would expect of Austin. Our waiter met us in surprising (and suspicious) good spirits, it being nearly midnight, and asked us many questions ending in “love.” As in, “Can I top off your water, love?” Or, “Now, that comes with rice, would you like the tortillas as well, love?” Keep in mind that he was a rail-thin hipster Austin dude with little trace of a southern accent. Other memorable events at the diner included Sara pointing out a woman at the other end of the restaurant, telling us, “Look! That woman has a whipped cream mustache, and her friend isn’t telling her!” We practically fell over ourselves leaning and twisting around to see the woman and her insensitive friend. Gradually it dawned on us that the mustache was not, in fact, whipped cream, but instead a large butterfly Band-AID covering the woman’s upper lip. Yes, we’re going to Hell.

By the time we returned to David’s apartment, it turned out to be our latest day yet. Rachel couldn’t resist the internet, though, and spent a little while reading it (and updating the blog). We fell asleep tired, full, and happy, and a couple of us were even clean.

New Mexico!

Greetings! Under time pressure! We're stopped at the New Mexico Welcome Center rest stop, which has free Wi-Fi! We couldn't pass up the opportunity to post to the blog, so we're racing battery charge and team patience.

Real updates soon, from either Vegas or LA!

On to Blue [something] Lake State Park in NM tonight!

Go team!

k bye.

On Selling Your Soul to the Devil

From the blue grass of Kentucky, we hit the road west and south towards Clarksdale, MS, home of the legendary "Crossroads," where guitar-picker Robert Johnson reputedly sold his soul to the Devil in return for amping up his guitar-picking skills. Though Robert Johnson doesn't still stand there with his guitar and can of Budweiser, Abe's Barbeque stands as a magnetic beacon to hungry travelers craving the spicy tang of Mississippi sauce.

A random Shell fueling station along I-40 W witnessed the momentous transition from hiking boots to flip flops (for most of us--Annie's still holding out). By the time we reached Abe's, it was positively balmy.

As soon as we crossed into MS from TN, the sheer flatness of the landscape struck us immediately. Compared to the gentle hills of central Kentucky and the 9% grade of Rt-50 in West Virginia, the empty air where land should have been cradling the road seemed a little spooky. Tara radioed from the other car (yes, we have walkies. and two cars) to explain that we were now in the flood plain of the awesome Mississippi River, and that the "hill" to our let was in fact the natural levee created by the river's historically unfettered flow. Now, however, the US Army Corps of Engineers has straightened the Big Muddy's banks, dammed its waters, and "controlled" its natural flood habits so that the plain no longer receives its nutritious alluvial deposits.

Fields lined both sides of the road, despite the lack of natural fertilizer. Tara again radioed from the other car:

Tara: Name that crop!

Rachel (joking): Sorghum!

Tara: No, cotton!

Rachel, Annie, and Julia: Holy crap!

Thus we northerners set our eyes on our first fields of cotton. The winter sun beat down through our windshield, making us uncomfortably warm. We all agreed that we couldn't imagine how terrible it would be to have to work those fields in the dead heat of summer.

We closed in on the Crossroads to the soundtrack of rumbling stomachs. I'm sure that if any of us had been offered a delicious barbeque sandwich in return for our everlasting souls, it might have been a tough decision for some of us. Luckily, we weren't forced to make the choice, and we rolled into Abe's in prime condition to enjoy one of this trip's simple pleasures: fantastic, cheap, locally-specific food. As we ate, four men at the table behind us talked crops, winter wheat harvests, and water pumping, all while scribbling notes on yellow legal pads and chomping numbers with handheld calculators. A high-powered business meeting in Clarksdale, it seemed.

Bellies contentedly full, we left Abe's and headed to our fourth and final state of the day, Arkansas. We crossed over the Mississippi, looped around to the north, and camped in Lake Chicot State Park, near Lake Village, AR. Lake Chicot is an oxbow lake, and we thoroughly enjoyed that fact (I don't know how, exactly, but we did). Our arrival was timed perfectly to not only coincide with pitch darkness, but also so that we would miss the Visitor's Center's hours of operation by a full 2 hours. We drove around for a bit, decided to wing it, and ultimately pulled into a random campsite and called it home for the night. Setting up camp turned out to be fairly easy, and we curled up in Tara's giant 8 person tent to the sound of each other's scribbling pens and the wind rustling our tent flaps.

we are in KENTUCKYYY
and on our way to abe's to get some sweet bbq.
more to come..

love, us

we tried to leave but we had too much stuff

THUS, begins the beginning of our trip of trips. It all started one very chilly day (today), as nothing much was happening in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Really, nothing of note. No one was there, the city cried out painfully in its emptiness and loneliness. The plaintive town's cries echoed from coast to coast, across great gulfs and deep divides until, one day (today), they were answered.

BY whom were they answered, you might ask? By some Messianic agent of change sprung from the forehead of Abraham Lincoln himself? By a brilliant, honest public servant who has practiced a calm serenity for most of his life in anticipation of this moment? No. That would be crazy.

WE, instead, answer the city's call, and not just that one. The call of every town big and small across the country. From our home bluff to yours, we will travel miles and miles in search of place, people, and popsicles. Yes, even in winter. Because we [heart] popsicles. (POPSICLES? who writes this stuff?)

STAY tuned, for today's momentous events do not end with the setting sun. Nay, our work will continue much longer (for about 4.5 weeks), and will bring us from sea to sea, across vast plains, and through mountainous mountains.

Happy trails,

New Kids on the Bluff