We arrived in Seattle around 9pm. We checked in the hotel, surfed and slept. The next morning I called my friend, Zeynep, to see if she was up for lunch. We made a date and went to checkout Pike Place Market.

It was a beautiful day in Seattle, cool but sunny. We walked around the market, going in and out of stores, watching the flying fish, and buying cashews. We walked over to my friend Sarah’s dad’s gallery, the William Traver Gallery, and chatted with her friend Ben.

When I talked to the dept of transportation, they told me to rush and take an early ferry to Bainbridge island so we would be able get across faster. I called and apologetically cancelled with Zeynep and we drove to the ferry. It turned out we were too late and were going to have to wait almost two hours so we chose to drive instead.

The Olympic Peninsula was covered with evergreens and lakes. On our way to the Hoh rain forest we ran into a huge line or cars. Miles and miles of cars. We tu!rned back, trying to find out what went wrong. As it turns out, a cement truck turned over and the road had been blocked since 9am. We decided to turn back and take a small hike in Sol Duc. There was a small trail which was like a rainforest. The trees were tall as far as the eye can see. Moss covered the trunks and branches. Mushrooms spurted out of the ground and bugs covered the forest. It was my first time in a forest like that and I couldn’t get enough of the lush green.

All the guides said not to go to the forests in the weekend due to huge crowds so we decided to skip Mt. Rainier National Forest and drove south to Portland. We stopped in Centralia for the night and are currently on our way to Portland.

Seattle and Washington is beautiful. The weather was really pleasant, the people fun.

Lodging: Fairfield Inn Bellevue@$71 & Centralia Inn@40
Car’s Mileage: 14,642
Gas: $11.54@1.59 & $14.21@1.55
Roads: 2 to Spokane, 5 to 110 to Olympia Nat. Forest, 5 to Portland
Sites: Seattle, Olympic Nat. Forest

At 4pm we arrived at Devil’s Tower. The tower is visible from the horizon. You need to register to climb it so we took a hike around it and Jake went up as far as they let him. On the way back, we saw two doe with two fawns. We also stopped to watch the prairie dogs which were endlessly entertaining.

Since it was already late, we spent the night in Gillette. Our dialups didn’t have a local number but the hotel had a business room where you could use their computer. We wanted to download the linksys drivers for the wireless to my laptop so we grabbed the crossover ethernet cable in the car and stuck it in their computer and, ta-da, it could see my laptop. There had to be some advantages to carrying all the computer equipment around.

The drive to Yellowstone was pretty but long. It took us 5 hours to arrive at the east gate. By the time we saw the lake, went down to the Grand Teton Park and back, it was already 8pm so we decided to spend the night at the park. The camp ground was really pretty but had no water and only pit toilets. We set our phone to alarm at 5am and watched the rest of our movie on my portable DVD player. We had to watch it inside because the mosquitoes were swarming us.

The Grand Tetons were amazing but obviously need to be hiked because the road didn’t get too near them so that was a bit of a disappointment. Yellowstone proved otherwise. The night we arrived, we didn’t get to see much as it was already late and the speed limit in the huge park varies between 35 and 45. We did see elk and a bear and we drove south bu that was mainly it for the day. We camped for the night and decided to get an early start. At 5:30am we got on the road and saw Old Faithful, the geyser. It erupted 20 minutes or so after we got there. We watched it wrapped around my blanket cause it was still freezing out. We stopped at the many geyser basins, we hiked to the lower falls, saw the mammoth hot springs and finally, 6.5 hours later, we left.

Lodging: Hotel in Gillette@68 & Lewis Lake Camp in Yellowstone@10

Car’s Mileage: 13,029

Gas: $14.21@1.61 & $9.99@1.62

Roads: 90-14 to Devil’s Tower, 90-14 to Yellowstone, 191 to Grand Teton, 89 to Montana

Sites: Devil’s Tower, Bighorn Mountains, Yellowstone Nat. Park, Grand Teton Nat. Park

Now that we’re staying at a hotel with broadband access I figured I’d post our route in case people have recommendations. We’ve been adding sites as we go along so this schedule is not rigid. I will put the added sites in italics so you can see how much we’ve already added. Also, the original plan was not to drive more than 200/300 miles a day so if it seems we are covering very little ground per day, that’s the reason. We’ve also gotten more flexible on that so I’ll try to show those changes, too. The days are not dated since we didn’t want to be locked into a date in case we chose to stay somewhere longer.

Day 1: Boston to Pennsylvania – driving through New Haven for some banking needs
Day 2: Pennsylvania to Louisville, KY
Day 3: Kentucky to St. Louis, MO – we ended up making it to St. Louis in two days and spent the fourth of July weekend in town with good friends.
Day 4: St. Louis to Oklahoma City, OK
Day 5: Oklahoma City to Dallas, TX
Day 6: Dallas to New Mexico Border Big Spring, TX
Day 7: Big Spring to Carlsbad Caverns, NM – that day we also did White Sands and ended up spending the night by Valley of Fires
Day 8: Carlsbad to Santa Fe – we also visited Valley of Fires
Day 9: Santa Fe to Great Sand Dunes, CO – we ended up driving all the way to Colorado on Day 8 and spent the night at the Grand Sand Dunes so we ended up saving one more day
Day 10: Great Sand Dunes to Rocky Mountains – we also saw Black Canyon and drove to Fort Collins, CO for the night instead.
Day 11: Colorado to Badlands/Mount Rushmore/Crazy Horse Memorial, SD – this is a bit ambitious so we might take two days, especially since we won’t get on the road until noon. It turned out that we camped at Custer State Park that night and saw all of the above the next morning.
Day 12: South Dakota to Devil’s Tower/Yellowstone, WY – we thought this might take two days as well. We ended up spending the night in Gilette after the Devil’s Tower and drove to Yellowstone the next day spent the night and drove around the park the day after. We also visited the Grand Teton National Park.
Day 13: Wyoming to Missoula, MT – we also wanted to add the Great Falls (I’m not sure that’s what they are called) We skipped Missoula, went to Glacier National Park instead, camped, and visited the park the next day. We did also get to stop by Great Falls.
Day 14: Missoula to Spokane or Seattle, WA – depends on how much driving we can do that day. We made it to Seattle and are planning to visit the Olympic National Park and Mt. Ranier National Park so we will probably take an extra day here.
Day 15: Seattle to Portland, OR
Day 16: Portland to Boise, ID
Day 17: Boise to Craters of the Moon Nat. Park – we were also told to visit Red River along the way.
Day 18: Idaho to Salt Lake City Vicinity, UT – we decided to add on the Bonneville Salt Flats and we were told to stay in St. George in Zion National Park for the night.
Day 19: Utah to Four Corners/Canyons of the Ancients/Canyon De Chelly, AZ – we were told to go through Sedona on our way.
Day 20: Canyon de Chelly – Grand Canyon – we may take an extra day here, depending how tired we are and how much of the canyon we get to see.
Day 21: Grand Canyon to Las Vegas, NV – we added Hoover Dam on the way
Day 22: Las Vegas to San Diego, CA – our new home!

There you have it. This is the plan as it stands now. I am sure there will be changes and additions but we’ve been having a blast and we think we’ll end up seeing almost every great site in the country. The one thing we left out was the Pacific Coast Highway which we decided would be a trip of its own once we settle down in San Diego.

Including the trip in May, the states we will have not visited at all will be: Vermont, Maine, Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and North Dakota.

Did we miss anything? Are we seeing something that’s not worthwhile? All comments are very appreciated. Our method of choosing the sites was opening a US AAA map and looking carefully so we may have easily missed some amazing places.

Carlsbad Caverns and Santa Fe were two original spots we had decided to visit but once we drove into the state we decided we had to go to the white sands and our friend Travis recommended that we check our the Valley of Fires so we’re doing it all.

New Mexico so far has been drastically different than anywhere I’ve been. The roads are completely flat with nothing for miles and miles. We occasionally see some cows and some mountains in the distance. We’ve seen a few little animals scurrying off the road. They look like squirrels but kinda small. I have no idea what they are. But we’re often alone on the road for miles at a time, which is a bit scary in the middle of the torrential rain that just poured.

The cavern was unbelievably huge, very humid and somewhat smelly. It was a long hike to get to the bottom but it was worth it.

On the way west, we drove through Cloudcroft where the air suddenly went from 100s to 60s. We started seeing trees and mountains. The town is around 8000ft. and seems to be a ski area.

The contrast between the sands and the lava and between the barren desert and the lush Rio Grande area, the flat and the mountains makes this state fascinating to me. The cutest part of today was Jake seeing a prairie dog on the side of the road and our seeing a couple on a bike and dog with its very own tiny helmet.

In Santa Fe we emailed our teacher, Prof. Miller, from CMU who works at the Santa Fe Institute. We hadn’t seen him in 6 years. He was there and we had a nice chat and tour and got back on the way. We’re now driving to the scenic route through the Carson National Forest up to Colorado.

Lodging: The Four Winds Motel, Carrizozo, NM@$44
Miles on the car: 10715
Gas: $20.72@1.49 and $10.12@1.45
Roads taken: 180 to Carlsbad, 285 to Artesia, 82 to Cloudcroft, 82 to White Sands, 54 to Carrizozo and 25 to Santa Fe
Sites: Carlsbad Caverns, Lincoln National Forest, White Sands National Monument, Valley of Fires, Santa Fe

We were still not too tired when we passed by Tulsa, so we decided to continue to Oklahoma City and arrived in town at 7:20pm local time. We set up camp at an RV Park right off of the highway. There was only one more tenter, a woman with two young kids. She told us she would have slept in the car if we hadn’t been there.

After we set our tent up, we drove down to the memorial which really was quite magnificent. Afterwards, we drove around looking for a movie theater and finally asked two women at a gas station. Legally Blonde 2 was so bad that even I didn’t like it and I’m not exactly what one would consider selective.

Driving around last night and this morning, the city seems so deserted. There are many run-down, empty gas stations and stores. It didn’t feel scary, just odd. I wonder what people do in this city. The one place that seemed somewhat lively was a small section called Bricktown. It has a pretty canal with bars and restaurants overlooking it.

Today’s drive is south on 35 to Dallas. Here’s a bit a trivia I learned recently: the odd numbere highways go north-south and the eveb ones go east-west and the numbers increase from south to north and from west to east. Oh and if you ever wanted to visit the largest McDonalds, it’s on 70 somewhere between Missouri and Oklahoma.

After a week in the Caymans, two days in NYC, ten days in Turkey and four days in Boston, we’re back on the road. This time our final destination, and hopefully our new home, is San Diego.

We’ve learned some good lessons from the first leg back in May so our car is a lot less heavy now. We broke up the stuff across three smaller bags instead of one huge one. We didn’t bring the 47 pairs of shoes I own. We traded the box of books for a bag of books. Especially since all I read in the last month was Five Quarters of an Orange, the Shipping News, the Eight and Range of Motion.

The back seat holds only the food, the cooler and the AAA maps. We have two 12-packs of diet coke and quite a bit of snacks.

We put another 256megs of RAM into my laptop and got a car-charger so I can continue the Python coding I’ve been doing for my father-in-law. We brought along two more laptops, the little libretto and an old loaner. With one blackberry, two phones, three laptops, five cameras, two iPods, one Rio, one Palm and one Visor, we have quite a bit of charging to keep up with.

We planned out most of the route. The trip doesn’t really start until we leave St.Louis since we’ve seen most everything east of that, we decided to zoom to Missouri, see our friends and go from there. We have 21-driving days planned but I can’t so far tell if we’ve over or under estimated.

We didn’t get on the road till 1pm but we’re now making way through Pennsylvania, hoping to reach St.Louis tomorrow night. We’ve already begun reading a fascinating book, The Secret House by David Bodanis.

Right as we entered Connecticut, I looked over to my right and made an eye-connection with a driver to my right. I remarked to Jake about how much the driver looked like my friend Pat. A few minutes later, the same car put on its sirens and pulled us over. The cop came over to me and after giving us a bit of a hard time decided a ticket would be a terrible way to start our trip, so he let us go.

Lucky!