You may have heard my plan to go all the way down to Big Bend NP, which is at the southern edge of Texas on the Mexican border. It had everything that I was looking for for my first overnight bike trip: backcountry campsites, miles and miles of unpaved roads, many of them relatively flat, very few people, and a bike shop (relatively) close by. It’s also supposed to be strikingly gorgeous. However it would add approximately 10 additional driving hours to my trip. They are also having a massive water shortage (like most of …

This will be a quick post as I have to get back on the road again. I had decided that since this will be roughly my fourth time driving across the US, I would switch it up a bit and head south. This was also an attempt to gain warmer sleeping-outside temperatures, which at 75+ degrees I definitely got in the Southeast.
I had a bunch of fun in Mississippi, checking out the Delta Blues Trail which starts in the town of Clarksdale, the town where Muddy Waters was born, and follows Route 61 south from …

Well, I’m off. I’m still not completely at peace with the decision, but nevertheless a move to California is in motion. The acute reason is that I can get my professional engineering license there a year earlier than any other state. The more obtuse reason is that I’ve wondered about living on the west coast for years now, and I already have some good friends in San Francisco, so why not?
The car is loaded with surprisingly little: 3 bags of clothes, a trashcan full of shoes, one box of kitchen things, a small plastic …

After Death Valley my cousin and I returned Niagara, our faithful camper van, and hopped on planes to San Francisco. After just a couple of days there we got in another rental car and headed up to Northern California. This was our second road trip together up there and I doubt it will be our last. Our first destination on this outing was a place called Fern Canyon up in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park which is famous for its lush woodland and the Roosevelt Elk, the largest subspecies of elk in North America. …

My first stop on this spring trip was Death Valley National Park. It was not what I pictured (a deep bowl surrounded by high peaks, not a wide open vast desert), but it was adventuresome as I thought it would be.

I met my cousin Ellen in Las Vegas, which was my first time there. After walking the strip for about half an hour and popping into the Bellagio, I quickly concluded that I had seen enough. It is a bizarre place.
The next morning we took a taxi to Escape Campervans to pick up …