The Deadly Duo

My struggle with New York City driving had not even begun once we had dropped Eric off at the airport. It was now time to face traffic in the city during evening rush hour. Honestly, I had no idea which roads to take, so I was just listening to the instructions provided by Tweedy’s phone. Before we knew it we were in the dead center of the city. We even drove right by Times Square! Unfortunately, I have no pictures of that moment. It took all my concentration just to navigate those roads and the heavy traffic. But no need to worry, you'll get to see pictures from NYC once I get to that part of the trip.

We did end up surviving the horns, crowds, and deadly traffic maneuvers, arriving at Jaclyn's residence in the state of New Jersey a bit earlier then I might have thought it would take. Jaclyn was another person that we found via the couch surfing app. She runs a music business that sells instruments and (even more awesome in my own opinion) plays music for events. Her particular instrument of choice is flute, but she is well versed with the piano as well. She was super nice to us and provided a floor to sleep on and the next day allowed Tweedy and I to do some catching up on our social media before we took off and hit the road to return once again to Pennsylvania. 

When we reached Pennsylvania it was already dark. With this being the case we chose a nearest state games land on the map (that’s the open space for hunting that people aren't techinically allowed to camp in) and set up the tent. We made a batch of beans with the deathly peppers provided by the girl at Kafe Kerouac that was far beyond the spicy level that most average U.S. citizens would ever subject themselves to. Thankfully we survived the self-inflicted torture (both Tweedy and I thought it was delicious in all honesty). After our bellies were full we retired to bed and fell asleep to the sound of guns being fired deeper in the woods.

Morning arrived and we pointed ourselves towards Hershey. For those of you saying “No way! Hershey isn’t a town, that’s a chocolate company!” turns out it’s both. Not only that, but the chocolate is made there in that town. The Hershey company has also thrown up a lot of tourist attractions in the area. Most of it a person has to pay for, such as the museum that Tweedy and I walked into first. After learning that there was an admission fee for all of the attractions in the building we just snapped a few pictures of the waiting area and headed out again to go down to Hershey’s Chocolate World where the internet said we could find a free tour. The following mural was painted on the wall of the museum that we went into first.

At Hershey’s Chocolate World we were floored by the amount of candy that was available for purchase. The majority of the place was more of a candy store than anything else.

What Tweedy and I had come to see was tucked in the back corner of the building. It was a free ride. That magic word "Free." We had to give it a go. My personal opinion is that the very beginning and very end of the ride are the best parts, this is because you have to walk across a floor that is constantly rotating into or out of the seats for the ride which are also in constant motion. The rest of the ride is a tour through the chocolate making process narrated by a cow and various pieces of chocolate candy. It was hokey to say the least, but a fun little ride, especially considering the price. Afterwards you even get a little piece of chocolate. Tweedy made the observation that this free candy was probably offered as a way to induce the desire to buy more chocolate once we returned to the candy shop that made up most of Hershey’s Chocolate World. Not going to lie—I almost fell for the trap. But it soon became clear that the prices for chocolate there were even more expensive than prices at normal grocery stores. So if you want to eat Hershey chocolate in Hershey, buy it at a Walmart beforehand.

After that little taste of amusement park rides, I wanted more. We went to go take a look at Hershey Park right across the street, but to my chagrin it was closed that day. It didn’t keep us from walking all the way around the park and seeing what we could. This included some little statues that could be posed with for some good photo ops.

We also managed to find a giant ice arena that we wandered around for a few minutes. Tweedy even found a hockey puck that he held on to as a souvenir. Ultimately we decided there was nothing else to see there, so we got back on the road to get to the next tourist area we had skipped on our first pass through the state—Gettysburg. But first we had to stop at Rita’s. Anyone who has experienced the perfection of Rita’s custard and ice knows that it can’t be passed up, especially while in the state where it was born. There’s no way to describe it, just know that if the concept of a fluffy cloud-like heaven could be translated into a cold food it would be a Rita’s Gelati.

After the taste of heaven, we went to the place where America experienced its taste of hell. When you pull into Gettysburg it’s hard to believe that it was the location of the bloodiest battle to ever take place on U.S. soil. It is such a small, quiet, and quaint little town. But there are quite a lot of tourists, so that does make it a bit more packed.

Our first stop was the museum. It’s remarkable how much is present solely to detail one war that involved two halves of a single country. The museum size-wise is about two thirds the size of the giant war memorial/museum in Indianapolis, while the information contained there (such as written placards or informational films) might actually be greater than what was contained in the Indianapolis War Memorial. Here is just a little taste of what a visitor may find there.

After the tour of the museum we decided to wander out into the fields nearby to take a look at the terrain those involved in the civil war faced there at Gettysburg. All along the roads are monuments representing every unit of cavalry, foot soldiers, cannoneers, etcetera. And most of them look quite exquisite. Most majestic of all was the State of Pennsylvania Monument that has Winged Victory standing atop it and President Lincoln standing at one of the corners. You can take a staircase up to an overlook, though it’s much shorter than the Indianapolis Civil War Memorial. Still—since the surrounding area is rather flat—you can get quite the view.

That night we stayed with Ben, whom we found on couch surfer. Ben lives on a beautiful piece of property that has been in his family for several generations. His experience with the couch surfers before us was a bit negative. Tweedy and I wanted to change that around, so we got his kitchen cleaned up and made him some of our famous beans, we toned down the heat this time so it wasn’t quite as violent on the taste buds. Over dinner Ben shared with us stories of some of his travels, including a bike ride that he had made from there in Pennsylvania all the way across the country to Portland, Oregon. It made me feel like we were cheating by using cars for our travels. Still nothing would ever make me leave my beautiful Ophelia behind and opt for a bike instead (Ophelia is my car, just in case I haven’t let her name slip before). After chatting for a bit we sat down and did a small amount of work on our social media before going to bed.

The next morning we said goodbye to Ben and got back on the road again. We were driving all the way to the north end of Pennsylvania that day to see Penn’s Cave.  Penn’s Cave is one of the few caves in the U.S. that you tour by boat! Not only is it not good for people who have issues with claustrophobia or nyctophobia, but they even found a way to keep people who are afraid of the water at bay. Tweedy and I don’t have issues with any of those fears, which I suppose made us the perfect candidates for that short tour. The cave itself wasn’t all that long, but the tour took a full hour since the boat couldn’t go all that fast, plus the only way out was the same way that you went in. At the end of the cave was a decent sized pond to turn around in though, which sat in the middle of a wildlife refuge. That’s where we saw a giant bull elk, who looked at the boat full of tourists with a judgmental look for disturbing his peace. All in all I’d say Penn’s Cave is definitely worth the twelve dollars it costs for the tour.

That night Tweedy and I drove back across the state to sleep in another Pennsylvania Game Lands (Number 58 to be exact). There were no gun shots to be heard that night or even people to be seen, so we felt safe building up a fire to keep us warm while we made and ate our beans. I went to bed a bit before Tweedy, and then woke up thirty minutes to an hour later to him asking me to step out of the tent. I was very tired and disoriented so I was rather unwilling to get out of the tent. Instead I sat up and unzipped the tent partially to ask him what was going on. Apparently Tweedy had yet another encounter with wildlife. We’re not sure what it was this time (I’d hazard a guess that it was deer), but what we do know is that he saw four sets of green glowing eyes. Thankfully nothing happened and we escaped without any dings and I was able to fall right back to sleep a few minutes later.

The next morning we got up and drove towards Knoebels—a very old-school amusement park that I had celebrated my twenty-first birthday at. I was super excited to go back, but my heart fell when we arrived just to find that the park was closed. So instead of spending money at Knoebels we decided to spend money on a big lunch because we skipped breakfast and had the all-you-can-eat wings at Quaker Steak and Lube. One of my favorite restaurants from my year in the state. We definitely got our money’s worth seeing as both Tweedy and I put away more than thirty wings. That’s over sixty wings total between two guys. 

There was a dance that night in Philly and my dancing clothes were still dirty so I decided that it might be a good idea to stop by the laundromat and Tweedy agreed. Once the clothes were clean we had just enough time to drive down to Philly in order to get to the dance in time. It was easy enough to find the building, but figuring out where the dance was inside took a few minutes. There was a comedy show happening there, which had the entire lobby packed full of people. The top level had a yoga and meditation class, and then we found a door off the landing between these two floors and inside was the dancing!

Philly has been one of my favorite places to dance so far, even though the city itself is not one of my favorite cities (I apologize to all those Philly lovers, it does have some great architecture, I'll give it that, and it is quite possible that I just didn't get a full Philly experience). I met several great dancers, including one by the name of Julia. We had no place to stay that night and needed to pick up Eric in the morning from the airport in Philadelphia, so when Julia offered to let us stay at her place an hour or so away. We jumped at the offer. Halfway there we got a call from Eric saying that he would not be able to make the flight that he had originally planned on, so that meant when we got back to Julia’s we were in no rush to go to bed. We put on some music and danced while we fixed a late-night snack and eventually fell asleep just before the sun came up.

Upon waking up in the early afternoon we came to the realization that we had ended up in a beautiful house near the shore of New Jersey. Once we had all dragged our sleepy bodies out of bed the next day and got some food in our bellies we went to check out the ocean where we all did a little boogie boarding. 

Daylight didn’t last too long (since we had been up so late), and when the night moved in we went out to check out the night life. We ended up in a little joint called Johnny Mac’s House of Spirits. The place was full of fun little signage and little antique toys and books. There was so much to look at that it was hard to stay focused on the conversations. One of the best parts was that with every drink you got a free cheese pizza—not a free slice of pizza, a whole pizza (sure it was still sized for individuals, but it was a whole pie!). It was quite delicious too.

As the night continued to wane we walked out to the shore again and stood by the water before wandering back to the car. We stayed awake almost the entire night since we had to pick up Eric from the airport early the next morning. I fell asleep for a short nap, but then it was time to go and reunite with the third member of our group.  

Falling to the Beat of Our Own Drum

There are times in life when plans A all the way through Z don’t end up working out. It’s at those times when a person resorts to animalistic need without regard for how he or she may be judged or whether or not his or her actions are in accordance with local rules and regulations. That was how our little gang of three was feeling when we crossed into Ohio late at night. It was drizzling rain when we pulled up at a roadside rest stop to make our beans for dinner and discuss our options for the coming evening. We had hit up family and friends and turns out that even with all three of us and in particular both Tweedy’s and Eric’s knack for networking not a single one of us had a connection in Ohio. We checked the map for any nearby national forests and once again came up dry. Next we started checking all of the nearby state parks to see if any didn’t have hours of operation, but all of them were already closed. Plans A through Z, and not a single decent possibility. It was time to exercise our creativity a bit.

First idea was to set up a tent right there at that rest stop, but after some looking around we found the signs that said camping was not allowed. Seeing as it was a rest stop on the side of the interstate we were pretty sure someone would catch sight of our six-foot-tall tent if we were to pitch camp there regardless. Maybe another roadside pull-off then? No, that seemed unlikely since we were just outside of a city. The ideas kept being fired back and forth and ultimately we decided on one of the more bizarre ideas that most people would probably never consider. We decided that good Christian folk are supposed to be all about feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and visiting the fatherless and the widow. We are (in technical consideration) homeless, so we thought that it would be fair to give a nearby Christian church the opportunity to practice what it preached and set up camp by a church. It was a Wesleyan church that we ultimately ended up sleeping on the grounds of. Not only was it a church, but it was also a school. Thankfully we found a random bunch of trees that obscured the view of our tent so that we slept without being disturbed despite the fact that while we were breaking camp in the rain the parking lot was full of cars.

That morning we drove into a park that we had initially considered sleeping in to make some breakfast. It was called the Batelle Darby Metro Park, and it was quite comfortable despite the fact that it rained all morning while we ate our oatmeal, and even continued to drizzle as we hiked around a bit. Ultimately though I would put it down as a good destination.

So started a long day of just constantly being soaking wet. Our next destination was Grigg’s Nature Preserve. I have no idea how Tweedy even found this on Google Maps because the park is small enough when you walk up to it. The parking lot for it is just big enough for maybe a total of six cars, and even then you think you must be in the wrong place because on one side is a busy road, on the other is a residential neighborhood, across from that is a river that is so developed the banks of it are paved. The good thing about this is every visitor can clearly tell where he or she is supposed to go—the little opening in the barbed wire topped chain link fences. Once you step in though you are transported away from the signs of humanity. Especially that day with the rain pounding down. The little stream that the boardwalk we were walking along crossed had swollen the bounds of its usual banks and the whole place was soaked, it got even heavier when we got to the falls that we had initially come to see. It was a small natural mecca amongst the ceaseless sprawl of humanity. And our next stop was to prove to be the same thing. But first we basked in the spray of these falls combined with the rain from above.

This next set of falls was known as the Indian Run Falls, and there was a surprising number of people at those falls, especially considering the state of the weather. I thought for sure that we would end up being alone there, but I was mistaken. We ran into a few students making a commercial for Ohio State University, the school they all attended. I was more in the mood to enjoy the setting then to chat so I left Tweedy and Eric to it while I wandered on ahead. After admiring the falls we took refuge under a gazebo to make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and plan where to take refuge from the rain for the next couple of hours. Tweedy and I were feeling the hurt of not getting our respective social media platforms updated so we convinced Eric that we needed to take refuge in a local coffee shop and get some work done.

The name of this Coffeehouse/Bar/Used bookstore was Kafe Kerouac. For those of you who do not know (which I am going to assume is a decent number of people seeing as even being an English major does not guarantee you will catch this reference) Kerouac was part of a literary movement during the 1950’s known as the Beat Poets. Some think that this self-appointed title is a reference to the beat of the jazz that they tried to make their writing sound and flow like, but according to the founders of the movement it actually referred to a feeling of being beaten physically, mentally, economically, and emotionally. Anyway, the reason that it was cool that we three traveling souls should wind up there is Kerouac and his contemporaries were famous for their love of road trips. In fact Kerouac’s most famous work is called On the Road. Anyway, I loved that little place, especially since I was also able to order a cappuccino name Hemingway. Unfortunately my laptop decided to take the entire time we were there to update so I didn’t get much written at that point. Eric went about talking to people though and managed to meet a delightful young lady who had a little garden that she left the coffeehouse to go back to in order to bring us back some fresh peppers and tomatoes. Now we didn’t find this out until a couple days later but some of those peppers were prime—in other words they turned our beans into an almost impossible to eat due to heat batch of deliciousness for several nights in a row. We all loved them. Wish I remembered her name so that I could give her a shout out for growing the best peppers ever.

That night we managed to find some people willing to give us space inside of their home to sleep and dry up in. These two loving ladies would be Tony and Linda. Spry ladies that were supposedly encroaching upon the later years of life, but you would never guess it from the kind of energy they had. They treated us to the use of their stove, showers, and even provided ice cream and Oreos for us to eat. We once again ended up arriving a little late, but Tony and Linda didn’t seem to mind and we had a fantastic conversation with them until it was time to fall asleep. The next day we said goodbye to our new found friends and continued on through Ohio.

First stop was Brandywine Falls inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It was a Saturday and the clouds had finally cleared away, which we were happy for. What we were not expecting was the huge crowd of people at the falls that resulted from it being a beautiful Saturday. We’re so used to wandering off the beaten path or visiting places at the strangest hours that we forget other people like to see the same things we do and just manage to do it at a different time and day then we are usually there. Still we had an enjoyable time and even managed to do a bit of off-trail wandering in order to get a view of the falls from the base.

On our way up from this little detour Eric bumped into what I can only assume was a couple out for perhaps their first date ever. I was able to glean this information from the guy while Eric was chatting up the girl for nearly thirty-minutes straight. As far as I can tell he was not intentionally hijacking the poor little guy’s date. In fact I think the girl was doing as much talking as Eric was if not more. But anyway, we all chatted a bit and then completed the loop around the park before continuing on to yet another set of waterfalls. (Ohio seems to have a huge assortment of waterfalls which makes little to no sense when you are me and thing the state is pretty flat. Of course as far as the Midwest goes it can almost be considered mountainous.)

Blue Hen Falls were located in that same National Park (Cuyahoga Valley), and once again we encountered an endless flow of people, but once again this didn’t keep us from wandering far off trail, but not after first checking out the two falls that all the people were there to see in the first place.

It was down past the second falls where we just kept on wandering until we happened upon a random skiing hill. This comes back to the point that I made earlier where as a Westerner I thought Ohio was just slightly better than Nebraska as far as topographical variation goes, but to the Midwesterners this was mountain country. In Colorado that skiing hill would have barely been considered steep and long enough for sledding let alone skiing and yet this hill had ski lifts that we of course had to climb around on. This included doing a bit of hand over hand swinging up and down the cable that held the seats at the bottom while just climbing on top of the entire fixture once we hiked to the top of the hill where we were able to get some fantastic pictures of the surrounding area.

Some more wandering eventually led us back to the main trail and the crowds of people, but not before I sunk up to my knees in mud (but only for a short moment since I was running—and no, I didn’t break my leg or twist my ankle when my leg suddenly dropped a foot and a half deeper than I was expecting *knock on wood*) and climbed a random vine halfway up a tree.

On our way to our next destination for the day we passed a dead deer on the side of the road, which Eric decided had been hit recently enough for us to take a slab of meat from it and save it for our beans at a later time. So ultimately we found ourselves up in Cleveland by Lake Erie in Wildwood State Park. We had started in another random lakeside park, but apparently all the rich people around that park owned it collectively and the public was not welcome. Yeah, those filthy dirty little (words that are not safe for little sisters) rich people. But the other park worked just as well for drying out our tent and skipping rocks before we continued on.

The aim was initially to get into Pennsylvania that night and stay somewhere in Allegheny National Forest, but as we were on our way Eric heard from his older sister Anne who was actually rather close to us but heading in the opposite direction back to Colorado. We decided Eric better take advantage of this opportunity to meet up with family on the road so we met up with her at a Burger King in Middlefield, Ohio where we bumped into a van full of Amish while we were waiting for her that we chatted up before they had to head home.

We chatted for a while with Annie there in the Burger King and then decided that neither of us were going to get to where we were initially planning on being that night so Annie did the daring thing and set up camp with us in the middle of a state games land that night. The next morning we drove up to Geneva State Park with Annie, once again considering getting into Lake Erie, but it was raining again, so instead we made some breakfast and just messed around while we let the tent dry once again under a giant awning. At that point it was time to say goodbye to Annie and to the state of Ohio.

I was finally going to go “home” to Pennsylvania, and my was I excited!

Sandy Beaches and Concrete Jungles

Just a quick heads up-- I did not have a chance to go through and edit this post before posting so hopefully you can pardon any mistakes or difficult sections to read, it's just time for us to get going now. 

We did eventually leave Justin and the two Matts and made our way down into the oven mitt part of Michigan. Sure it was several days later on the 25^th of September, but we did keep going. We left at around noon and headed down towards one of the more remarkable bridges in the entirety of the U.S. and out towards Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. Now everyone in the mitt part of Michigan refers to their location of the state by displaying their right hand palm upwards and pointing to which part of the state they lived in. Using this representation, Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore would be at the tip of the pinky. For those of you who might struggle pulling up that image in your own brain that is the most Western point on the northern shore of the main mitt of Michigan. Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore is actually considered a National Park and usually one would have to pay to get into the park, but somehow we always manage to show up after the main gate has already been abandoned, so we were able to go hiking around on these dunes (the day after we had spent a full day at the other dunes mind you) without having to pay the entrance fee. This also meant that we hiked back to our cars in the dark, but that was no issue for us. We have before and since done much later night hikes.

Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes are about twice the size of the Sable Sand Dunes, though the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes do have a lot more traffic. Even with us arriving as the sun was sinking below the horizon and the sky threatening the possibility of rain we still ran into several people on the trail out to the coast of Lake Michigan. It was a beautiful hike though, and the sunset really added to the aesthetic. The best part of all though was the color and look of the lake at the end of the hike. Somehow the water there right by the shore had taken on this turquoise glow. It was too beautiful to just look at, we had to take a dip in the water as well (for me it also meant finally bagging Lake Michigan). I mean look at it! You can’t tell me that you would not have wanted to go for a swim as well.

After hiking back to the cars we took a moment to fix some dinner there at the foot of the first dune before we went about trying to find a place to sleep. This involved quite a bit of driving around. Ultimately we realized that there was no decent National Forest nearby for us to set up camp, which meant we resorted to one of our more desperate means of setting up camp. We found a roadside pull off that had a picnic table and set up our tent right next to the picnic table and I tried to mostly block the view of our tent from the road with my car. It was not exactly the greatest location for privacy, but we were tired so we fell right to sleep.

Next morning we awoke to our tent being soaked once again. It had rained that night, and my sleeping pad had collected a decent amount of water within it since I was on the lowest part of the incline of the slight hill we had set our tent up on. This made me a little bit grumpy from the get go that morning. But thankfully Eric and Tweedy did not have to suffer through my mood since Tweedy had just switched to riding in Eric’s car the day before.

Our first stop was William Mitchell State Park where the boys made breakfast and I just continued in my moodiness. I did not manage to get out of my moody state of mind until we stopped at another little park a couple hours later. Bay City State Recreation Area was a park that butted right up to the shallowest part of Lake Eerie. We probably walked out into the lake about a hundred yards and still the water never got higher than my waist- it never even reached the waists of the other two though (darn those tall people). It was quite chilly that morning, which meant that I was happy it couldn’t get any higher than my waist, and even being waist deep was a bit too much at times. Still it was a great looking beach. During the summer I’m sure it’s packed.

After enjoying that bit of nature it was time to dive into another city. We drove into Detroit in the afternoon and parked our cars on the side of the street in Greek Town before beginning our self-guided tour through the city. For some reason Detroit gets a bad rap, and perhaps a couple years ago there was a reason for it (I remember seeing the pictures on the news of all the abandoned high rises and trashed demolition sites), but for me it ranks up there with Chicago, though it was nowhere near as bustling as Chicago. I think that will change over the next few years though as well as more people come to the realization that Detroit is really a beautiful city. We began our walk with wandering through the streets on the northern side of the city. This part of the city is full of older architecture. If I had to hazard a guess (which I do because I didn’t do any research about the city—sorry about that) I would say that most of those store fronts date back to the late 1800’s.

This was where the shopping district part of the town was located, which was not exactly up our alley as budget travelers, so after taking some time to enjoy the architecture we started to wander South towards the board walk part of town that follows along the Detroit River. This part of the city is absolutely gorgeous. It is lined with monuments and little art installments of the three-dimensional variety. Across the river you can see the southernmost part of Canada. It’s a random peninsula that dips below the rest of the country, pretty much a Canadian Florida. Believe the place looked like it was a resort town too, at least from where we stood on the other side of the river.

After that we wandered into the Renaissance Center. This is a conglomeration of five buildings that were built by GM, though they contain about fifty different companies. The buildings are set up with one center building that was taller than the rest and four satellite skyscrapers around it. We first wandered into the one owned by the Hilton and snuck into one of the elevators and rode it to the top floor of the hotel. Unfortunately, there were no windows that could be seen on that top floor. You had to have a room to get the view. We still wandered around in there for a minute with the hope of finding some way to access the view, but ultimately failing in our quest. Next we managed to get to the base of the center building. After asking several people where we could find access to find the elevator that went to the top floor we were able to find it. It was owned by Coach (a restaurant that was located on that top floor). The hostess there on the main floor was kind enough to just let us in so we could take the ride and see the view at the top. I’m pretty sure it has to be the best free elevator in the world. It is glass so you get to witness the view change and the rest of the world diminish right before your eyes before you arrive at the breathtaking view afforded there at the seventy-second floor.

Once we got to see that view the only thing left to do was get back to our cars and figure out a place to sleep. Fortunately we managed to find a walking path that goes right through what I’m pretty sure used to be the ugly looking part of Detroit that I saw those pictures of all those years ago. Now it is beautiful though, and is pretty much an outdoor art gallery for some amazing urban painters. I’m going to include a few specimens for you all to appreciate.

(I know, quite a lot of pictures in succession, but one of my little sisters was rather disgruntled with the fact that my last post did not have enough pictures, so I’m trying to make up for it this go round.)

That night Eric managed to find us a home to stay in since our tent was soaking wet and we did not feel too inclined to sleep by the side of the road again in a soaking wet tent. Helen and Steve let us into their home despite the fact that we were all complete strangers to them, they just happened to know someone that knew Eric and trusted her to not refer complete ruffians to stay with them. They were honestly some of the sweetest people I have ever met. A dinner of spaghetti and meatballs was waiting for us when we arrived along with a side salad and a desert of ice cream sundaes. That was the most satisfied my stomach has been on the trip thus far (though the Chicago style pizza that Matt’s parents provided for us is a very close second). After a delightful dinner we watched a less delightful display with the first presidential debate. It was quite the storm. Neither one of those two candidates looked good, though I enjoyed watching it because what I studied in school (rhetoric) translates perfectly to analyzing debates. Ultimately though I think that the entire country should just say “screw them” to the main political parties and instead only vote for the less well represented parties or write in a candidate. Because if we are all honest with ourselves we’ll all realize that not a single one of us wants another Republican or Democrat as a president.

Anyway, we still slept well and I managed not to have any nightmares waking me up in the middle of the night. The next day we were served pancakes for breakfast and chatted with Helen and Steve before we headed out right around noon. It was hard to say goodbye to those beautiful people. I might have to go back to Detroit just so I can see Steve and Helen again.

But it was time to head on out. That night there was a dance to be a part of in Indianapolis, so we took to the road and in a couple hours we were telling Michigan goodbye after a nice long stay.

Don’t forget to check out Tweedy’s and Eric’s Youtube channels for the video documentation of the trip. 

Up UP and Away!

As I have mentioned something around 28 times—we get to where we are going to be sleeping late, and the night we slept in northern Wisconsin was no different. We drove into Chequamegon National Forest to find a place to camp. The campsite that we had left earlier that day had been our favorite up until that point and I know that I was at least hoping that Chequamegon National Forest would be just as pretty as Superior National Forest in Minnesota. It wasn’t. There was a lot of logging going on in the area so we would drive through a section of pretty decent looking woods just to come out of it a couple minutes later into desolate fields. Not to mention the roads were a bit difficult to manage, at least for Eric in his little Civic. Unfortunately for him I was the one leading at the time and I did not even think about the road conditions because my car just rolls over everything. What I found to be a pain was the fact that we couldn’t find any decent woods that would be nice to camp in, and when we did we would follow the road back just to find that it was a logging headquarters with several cords of wood stacked up everywhere. Eventually we managed to find a little pull off road that had a tree fall across it so clearly no loggers were using it. We set up the tent just beyond the fallen tree and then pulled out another tree back behind Eric’s car since we were still fairly close to the main road and we were hoping to get a little more privacy that way. Sleep crept on easily enough as late night turned to early morning.

Since we had gotten to bed late I was expecting to get the chance to sleep in late, but that was a foolish assumption. I had forgotten the level of paranoia that Eric and Tweedy still had in regards to sleeping by the side of a dirt road in a national forest that none of us had ever been in before. (I guess I should feel trepidation over it as well, but for some reason I don’t, and since that time all of us feel much to comfortable setting up a tent and sleeping just about anywhere—stay tuned for some of our more ridiculous campsites) Their paranoia caused them to wake me up at 6:00 in the morning because a white truck had driven by us twice, and at one point the driver may or may not have stopped and looked at our little camping site more intently. Whatever the case it freaked Eric and Tweedy out so we had to break camp and roll out as soon as possible in order to calm them down.

As we drove out of the forest we passed the white pickup, along with a few other trucks and a lot of other guys. Turned out it was just a hunting party trying to find each other. The good thing about waking up early is we had time to go and goof around somewhere for a while. Honestly we were just looking for the first park we found by the side of the highway that had picnic tables so I could fix us some morning oatmeal. Luckily we happened to stumble across the City of Ashland Maslowski Beach. It had rained on us the past couple of nights while we were sleeping, so while I got breakfast ready Eric and Tweedy set up the tent on the beach right next to Lake Superior (We’ve seen four of the five Great Lakes now and I have to say Lake Superior has been my favorite in every location that we’ve seen it) so that the tent could dry out.

After breakfast we changed into our swimsuits and took a dip in the lake.

It was cold, but thankfully the sun was out and the air was warm, so a bit of cold water was no big deal (it was still warmer than most of the mountain lakes I’ve been in back in Colorado). After the swim we continued to just hang out there on the beach. Our activities included playing on the nearby playground equipment, chatting with a couple ladies that were from the main body of Michigan visiting Northern Wisconsin, and burying Tweedy in sand.

After we had finished with our antics we broke the tent down and continued into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (from now on I will solely just use the abbreviation UP, and no this will not be in reference to the movie Up!). Shortly after we passed over the border into Michigan we had to stop for gas—I know, super exciting information, but I promise I will only mention fueling up if it leads to something. At this gas station we were introduced to the friendly and talkative nature of many Michigan natives. It was one of those gas stations where you have to pay inside, and when we went in to pay there was a lady by the counter who immediately started talking with us. Once she figured out why we were in Michigan and our quest to road trip all 48 contiguous states the talking just became more profuse, because she had lived the gypsy lifestyle since she was seventeen. I’m still torn as to whether I want to have a transitory lifestyle for that long or not; it was nice to hear it was possible though.

Back outside (about fifteen or twenty minutes later) I started getting chatted up by a biker dude. He was somewhere between the ages of sixty-two and seventy-eight. When a person has that much hair on his face it makes it rather difficult to pinpoint the age. Anyway, Eric and I chatted with him for another twenty minutes or so. He lived there in the UP, but he rode his Harley across the country at least once a year. In fact, he rode so much that he had put over a million miles on Harleys and on the particular bike we saw him on he had put over 660,000 miles. After chatting for a while we got back on the road. We thought that we would never see either of those two unique individuals ever again, and then the biker dude whipped up and around us. He pulled over on the shoulder and motioned for me to roll the window down. I did so and he shouted in that if we needed a place to stay we could crash at his place. After the past several nights of sleeping in a tent with rain pounding down on us, having a roof to sleep under sounded perfect, so we followed him down a winding road to his property.

This little bearded biker dude, Allyn (I figure it’s about time I get his name in here), built every building on his property with the help of his wife. Not only that but he built it with the trees that were on his property. There are five distinct structures on the property, and most of them are two stories tall. I was blown away! He and his wife also grow and raise their own food. This includes having a giant garden and raising a few head of cattle along with several chickens. They are almost completely off the grid aside from a small amount of electricity they use. Allyn is a retired mine worker and he says that with the way they live just his social security check provides him with more income than he can even use, and most of it just goes into paying for gas for his bike. We chatted with him late into the night, getting to try the fresh cuisine from the garden and even getting to try the wood burning sauna he had built (Allyn is one hundred percent Finnish, and apparently the Fins are all about their saunas).

Unfortunately we couldn’t hang out there forever and the next morning we said goodbye to Al and headed on up the UP. First stop along the way was the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. We saw two water falls there at the park—including Chapel Falls.

Next was a stop at the Stable Sand Dunes. We have a thing for sand dunes (especially Eric), a few months back we all went to the Great Sand Dunes together with Justin as well—who we were on our way to see. This means we would be returning to those same sand dunes in order to share that experience between all four of us again, though when we returned we would be doing a lot more, so I took pictures to remember those dunes during this first visit. And goodness gracious were they beautiful, especially as we crested the final dune and looked down and out to the apparently infinite Lake Superior.

After a couple hours of exploring the dunes we drove the last leg to our first extended reprieve of the road trip at Justin’s home (that is where I was when I posted two or three blog posts in quick succession). That first night there was no working though, just chilling out with Justin and two of his roommates—the two Matts. We also got a tour of Lake Superior State University the university they all attend up there in Sault Ste Marie (pronounce S-oo Saint Marie). That town is possible the only town that crosses the border with Canada—literally it is the same place on both sides of the border, but you still have to have a passport to see the Canadian side and we did not bring ours, so we had to remain on the U.S. side, which is no big deal because we spent most of our time on our laptops anyway, at least Tweedy and I did.

From September 20^th to 23^rd we just chilled. Our non-indoor activities included disc golf, going to the sauna at the school (not near as good as Al’s), shopping, and we went shooting and I shot a gun for the first time.

It was definitely a unique experience, though not one that changes my mind about needing more strict gun laws. Sorry for all those out there that love their guns—I definitely believe in the right of the people to have guns, but after all the shootings of innocent people I think it is about time that everyone stops whining and allows for a whole lot more restrictions to be set in the hope that we can at least decrease the number of mass shootings (all of the guns used in mass shootings in the past five years in the U.S. have been attained legally). I mean it did work for Australia after all. If you disagree that’s perfectly fine, Eric definitely disagrees with my views on gun control, and we are still great friends.

Finally Saturday rolled around—September the 24^th—when Justin was finally free of school responsibilities so we could return to the Sable Sand Dunes. We ended up spending the entire day there. Sometimes wading in the lake, other times scaling the most difficult parts of the dunes, walking along the beach, eating marshmallows and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, building a small fire. All in all it was a fantastic day. That night back at the abode we had a little party since we would be departing the next day, and I fell asleep with a contented smile on my face.

That will do it for the stories from Upper Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, next up is Detroit. Hopefully I’ll get that post up tomorrow.

More Corn Anyone?

Iowa… is a flat state. Part of that long strip down the country that is not really good for entertainment but is great for growing crops, like corn. We have driven past so much corn on this road trip (I’m sure we’ll see plenty more too), and once again we saw plenty of those familiar big ol’ grains. We left from Chicago in the morning and so crossed into Iowa around noon. Des Moines was the town we were aiming for, which sits right in the middle of the state. This meant that we had a good four to five hours of driving after crossing into the state, especially since we hardly ever stay on the interstate.

You see interstates are created to get people to places as fast as possible. They cut through the environment rather than wrap around it. The state highways don’t have near as much funding though, so blasting through the environment is avoided in favor of just wrapping around the hills and rising and falling with them. It makes the drive slightly more exciting than just making sure the wheels stay straight. Not to mention you can find random places to take a break from the drive as well.

In this case both of our stops along the way were by lakes. Sadly enough I have forgotten the names of both of them. I know that the first one we stopped at had a beach called Sandy Beach that was all set up for swimming and had a dock for boats as well. There were even bathrooms. All of this might make you think that it would be a great place to take a dip, but of all the lakes we had visited up to that point, and even since, I think that this was the worst possible one to go swimming in. Partly because the water was super murky, partly because the mud seemed especially sticky, but mostly because we found a decaying pelican caught in the buoys that marked out the border of the swimming area.

Sadly enough we did not discover this little “treasure” until after we had already got in the water. I got out pretty quick after that though. After air drying we continued on down the road, not pulling off again until we reached another smaller lake as the sun was dipping below the horizon. This was where we pulled off to make some dinner. The water was better here, but the mosquitoes were thicker as well, not to mention taking a dip in water while the temperature is dropping for the night is not the most appetizing of ideas. Still dinner was great, and the water was warm, surprisingly. Still not even Eric ended up getting in for a swim, and he is usually the first one into the water.

On we pressed until we hit Des Moines. I’m still not entirely sure what possessed us to decide that we should go see Des Moines. Maybe it was because we had just gotten done touring around a city and had been rather shocked as to how much fun we had there. Or maybe because there were no national forests or grasslands to be seen in the state and so we had to come up with something. There is always the possibility that it was just a “sight to see” close to the place we had set up to sleep at (in all likelihood it was probably this final fashion, funny how life ends up revolving around where one can find a place to sleep when one has no home to return to each night). Whatever the case I’m rather happy that we got to see Des Moines that night.

After spending two full days in the city of Chicago Des Moines felt like a ghost town, especially since most of the city was entirely deserted at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night. Even downtown Colorado Springs usually has a bit more happening at that time. The deserted aspect added its own bit of romanticism to it though. It was like all the lights and buildings in the city had been put up and given a spit shine just for us, at least all of those parts of the city that were not currently under construction, which was about half of it. I don’t know exactly what is going on there, but it seems to be some kind of downtown overhaul project that will eventually interconnect all of the downtown buildings with sky bridges. It looked nifty, but we weren’t able to get inside to test out any of the completed sky bridges ourselves. What we did get to see was the skyline, some beautiful bridges, and the very nice river walk that goes right down the middle of downtown Des Moines. Now as far as the social scene in Des Moines goes I can’t offer any critique, but if you are just looking for a city that is great to wander around in at night by yourself without feeling worried about your safety and while enjoying some beautiful scenery then I would suggest going to check out Des Moines.

After we completed our aimless wanderings we drifted into Ames where Tweedy had managed to find us a yard to pitch our tent in. You read that correctly, a yard we were pitching our tent in. It gets even better though. The person whose home we pitched our tent in lived in a student trailer park, which means there really wasn’t much in the way of individual yards. On top of it the home owner was not even awake when we set up our tent at around midnight, maybe even pushing one in the morning. All of this probably sounds completely ridiculous, but it gets even better. Tweedy did not even know the person whose yard we were sleeping in. She was actually the cousin of a friend of his from college who was just willing to surrender up a corner of her yard to three guys on a cross-country road trip. Thank you random stranger out there somewhere who I never even got the chance to meet!

The next night we had Tweedy’s uncle to go see in lower Wisconsin. That meant another day with a lot of driving. We tried to stop by a house that Frank Lloyd Wright built on the way, but it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Instead of checking out the house built by the water we ended up just getting in the river ourselves at a little park downstream that had showers and restrooms with actual running water (and there was no fee for day use at this park!). After all the driving from the day before and several hours left for the rest of the day we decided to set up our tent and take a little post-lunch nap before continuing on our way. That was one of the best low-energy afternoons of the trip yet.

After the short reprieve it was back on the road and we rolled on into lower Wisconsin around 7:00. We had officially seen Iowa. I have to say it really still puts Kansas to shame, even with all the corn.

Remember to check out the videos of the trip that Eric and Tweedy are putting together.

Big City, Little Drug Lords

Have you ever woken up not entirely sure where in the world you are? That was the feeling I had that first morning in Illinois. Once again we had driven late into the night, and since we had no connections in lower Illinois we had just driven into a national forest and had chosen a random turn off to set up camp. This random turn off happened to be a field full of tall grasses, and when we pulled off at night we just figured that it was a naturally occurring field in the midst of the forest. In the morning light we became keenly aware of our mistake. We had accidentally ended up on private property. Thankfully the owners of the property didn’t seem to mind since we were able to wake up late and break down our tent without ever running into another human. Of course the house we spotted was the lot over, and the farming equipment was a lot over in the other direction. In our credit we were able to find the one field on the property that was empty.

After a breakfast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we were back on the road and heading up through the center of Illinois towards Chicago. About halfway up we stopped at Rend Lake to take a little swim. The water was a bit cloudy, but refreshing. It was still at that temperature that makes those of us from Colorado distrust it, because how can water that is outside ever be warmer than 70°F? It was delightful though.

Our diet consists of three different meals that are always nearly the same though sometimes one is rotated with another. In this case our usual breakfast of oats traded place with the usual peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, which means there by the lake I pulled out our kitchen box and made us some oats. For the first time I added peanut butter to the oats. Since then peanut butter has been an essential ingredient. (Got to get your protein somehow, right?)

After the elongated break we returned to that all familiar companion—the road. On the way up to Chicago the sun began to sink below the horizon, granting us a colorful entrance to the City and livening up the otherwise flat and fairly boring landscape (though it still outdid what we saw going along I-70 through Kansas—I’m pretty sure that is what Hell will look like).

Finally, we pulled up on Chicago, and that view was incredible! Chicago at night is like a sea of stars that is fountaining out of the ground. Most of the time I don’t really get the romance of city lights at night, but that view made me realize that there is something to it after all. That also happens to be one perfect picturesque scene that I did not get a picture of. This is probably due to the fact that driving in a caravan through the city of Chicago is just about as difficult as pushing a camel through the eye of a needle. Trying to operate a camera while doing that is border line suicidal. Despite that being the case we somehow survived and ended up finding the home of Matt, one of Eric’s and Tweedy’s roommates from their last year at UCCS.

After a long drive all we really wanted to do was go to sleep, but since Matt's family had already finished their dinner we got out our kitchen box and made some extra dinner while chatting with one of Matt’s friends. Now I’m going to have to use an alias for this friend for reasons that will become super clear soon enough. Anyway, we’re going to call him Jeff. Now Jeff is a very small dude. Tweedy, Eric, and even I towered over him, plus he was rather scrawny. He was very white and had been raised in the wealthier suburbs of Chicago. This little white guy who spoke with a bit of a lisp was about nose deep in the business of distributing “chemicals” of the unlawful sort to apparently a fairly large clientele, he also was a Chicago native that lived right in the middle of downtown and offered to show us the city the next day. Honestly his method of income took me a bit by surprise, but getting a tour of a big city like Chicago from a native was too good of an offer to pass up, so we agreed to meet up with him the next day before bidding him farewell and passing out for a long night’s sleep.

Public transit is a beautiful thing, just as a heads up to everyone out there. We were able to keep our cars parked the entire time we were in Chicago, which is a very unique situation for a group of roadtrippers. The next morning, we rode the blue line into the city center (that is one of several trains/subways that go through Chicago, which cost 2.50 for a ride—a little steep for our budget, but we also had Matt there to buzz us through that day). It moved pretty slow, but still much faster than walking and much less stressful than driving and (even more so) parking.

Popping out of a hole into the middle of a city is not something I am particularly used to. Even when I have been to cities in Europe I end up walking around rather than using the subways. As a hiker I might stray into a cave every once in a while, but when I come out of those I’m surrounded by wilderness, not a forest of steel populated with flocks of people. Now flocks is an inaccurate description. We noticed fairly early on that a true city person walks by his or her self and does not smile or look at anyone else but instead plows forward through the masses, not even stopping for red lights at cross walks.

We slunk into these teaming masses and eventually found our way to Jeff’s apartment on the fortieth floor in the new east side, or as it is known in the street slang—The Plastics. It’s called this because just to get an apartment anywhere in that square mile of the city you have to prove income and have sources from several other places. Don’t ask me how Jeff managed to obtain all of that, because I got confused while he was trying to explain it to me. I think I lost him three times total and was fuzzy on the rest of it. Part of this may have been due to the slang he was using (though part of it was just doing illegal things is way far outside of my specialties). Sometimes I was wondering if he was even speaking English. Still, he managed to get into that area and the view from his window was something else.

That night we were planning on checking out the final concert of the Chicago Symphony at the giant bandstand in Millennium Park, but before we did that Jeff had some business to take care of and so decided to invite us along for the walk. Once again I found myself shaking hands with a little white guy who also was involved with “chemicals,” though his main product was more “herbal.” I don’t know what it is about the water in white Chicago suburbs, but clearly there is something there that stunts the growth of the youth and gives them strange ideas that they turn into business opportunities. Once again though I was shocked that the quality of the view that was just outside this little man’s window as well.

I could not linger though because I was supposed to meeting Megan, one of my friends that moved to Chicago a little while ago. For this reason, I did something that I have a feeling will make mom give me a call shortly after she reads this blog post. I decided that I would go off by myself back to Millennium Park with a phone that had a dying battery just as the sun disappeared entirely for the day. That is probably breaking at least three rules of city travel, but then city people never follow any of those rules, so why should I? I eventually met up with Megan and her beautiful dog.

Sorry, that dog is just so beautiful that he deserves his own picture in the blog. Now some people may find this blasphemous, but I think he might have been just as beautiful as the nighttime skyline of Chicago-- he definitely got as much attention if not more attention than the skyline--though that was absolutely gorgeous as well.

Anyway, the plan had been to watch the concert with Megan, but that beautiful white fluff-ball of a dog was not allowed in that part of the park. It was a sad day, but we still could sit and watch the face fountains spewing water while we caught up. Then I started freaking out because the guys had not texted me in a while and were not showing up either. So we began to wander around the edge of the park, and as we did so my phone died, which freaked me out even more. Honestly I could have gotten back to my car that night by myself, but I had done my lonesome traveling and Megan had to leave soon and I didn’t really want to finish watching the concert by myself and then wander to the subway and ride it back all by myself either.

By the miraculous random nature of the world though I caught sight of them right as they walked to the green space in front of the band shell. Never have I felt so grateful to see those tall goofy idiots! (They are not idiots by the way, very smart, but my stressed out self definitely wanted to call them idiots) I introduced them to Megan and then we took a seat on the lawn and listened to the last 20 minutes of the final summer series performance of the Chicago Symphony. That was quite the sight and sound. No better way to end our first day in Chicago.

I’ll hopefully get the rest of the blogs finished and caught up over the next week. This is just part one of Chicago, I’ll have to do one more for Illinois and then it will be Iowa, lower Wisconsin, Minnesota, upper Wisconsin, and now we are in the upper peninsula of Michigan.

As always, check out here for video footage: Eric and Tweedy

Missouri... Mizory... Mizery... Misery

I don’t know what kind of spell Missouri cast over us, but for some reason as hard as I think I cannot recall anything super interesting happening the first couple days that we were there. We woke up on the fifth of September with the intention of documenting what had already happened so far on our trip. You know, get the journals written, the photos compiled, the videos edited, and of course, the blogs written. But as you will all have noticed at this point, I only posted one blog that day, and that blog was as short as could be seeing as the subject matter was Kansas. As far as productivity was going for that day we were down near zero.

“Still something must have happened” you say, and to that I nod my head a bit and try my best to recall what we did with all the time that we had that day. Here is a real streamlined approach to it (because wasting words on doing nothing seems like such a lousy thing to do, of course I suppose that is exactly what I’m doing now, how many words have I shoved in this parenthetical statement already? Okay, maybe wasting words on nothing is more up my alleyway after all).

1.         Wake up and I make the morning oatmeal out on the front porch after Katt leaves for work. (Morning oatmeal is pretty much a sweeter rendition of evening beans, for this particular oatmeal I accidentally overloaded on the amount of molasses that I included, something that I have made sure to avoid since)
2.          Sit around and try to get some work done on social media outlets while trying to ignore the rising heat and humidity.
3.         Move around to the back side of the building to get some shade and snack on some food.
4.         Realize that we really are getting nothing done plus we can’t get access to the wifi at the back of the building so maybe we should go see if we can find the Missouri river.
5.         Wander aimlessly through town with a vague idea of the direction we should be going.
6.         Run into a random wall of trees in the middle of town and try and make our way through the brush eventually finding ourselves in a heavily wooded patch of land right in the middle of the city, eventually get out and back to the road.
7.         Decide to go back and get the cars and drive to the river.
8.         Get waylaid by stumbling across a whole bunch of Monarch Butterfly Chrysalises.
9.         Run into Katt when she gets home, find out we can check out the pool and community center there at the apartment complex
10.       Check out the pool and community center at the apartment complex
11.        Do a tiny bit of writing.
12.        Have a small little party to celebrate my birthday as we slip into September 6^th

Wow, that is quite a few words I wasted on nothing. And that was even with breaking it down to bullet points. Anyway, my birthday, September 6^th, came in with everyone waking up late and then once everyone was awake Katt treated us all to my birthday lunch. It was at a popular Kansas City chain restaurant called 54^th Street Pub and Eatery. The sandwiches there were beyond delicious, and the local beer I tried was delicious—very smooth, slight hint of fruit, and only a bit of bitterness on the finish. Once again, major shout-out to Katt for being the best hostess ever.

After hanging out for a bit longer we got in our cars and drove a few hundred miles to Jefferson City where we met up with Aaron, an old roommate of Tweedy’s and Eric’s (since I had hung around those two constantly I knew him as well). He offered us a floor to crash on in a room that had enough air conditioning to keep us at a decent temperature to fall asleep at—a rare thing to find in the state of misery… I mean Missouri. Our time at Aaron’s only extended through the night, then we were up and on the road again the next day on the search to find a cave.

Missouri is known for being the cave state and so we were hoping to find some cave that did not have any of the tourist walks in it, so that we could just go spelunking in it without anyone constantly staring over our shoulders, unfortunately that was not what ended up happening. We found Meramec Caverns on the map and so decided to head towards that cave since it also appeared to be near a state park. Our reasoning was even if Meramec Caverns was a tourist trap then at least we could wander through the state park and perhaps find a cave that was free of the irritating tour guides and regulations and planned routes through easily accessible segments of cave.

We reached the outskirts of Meramec and Eric and Tweedy had the keen desire to rinse off beforehand because they had been traveling through the land of endless humid heat in a car that had no air conditioning (personally I felt great, which will surprise my family since they all think my car has a horrible air conditioning system—turns out that all you have to do for it to work at 100% is fill the car with a whole bunch of stuff and drive through states with high humidity). So we stopped off at a river and swam around for a bit before going on to the cave entrance.

Meramec Caverns was indeed a tourist trap, and the price for a single adult was high above what we agreed to turn down ($15 had been our agreed maximum, the price was $23). We tried haggling with the tour guide behind the counter along with trying to figure out caves that we could go into without paying a fee. He mentioned a few places (actually he mentioned ten different locations, though didn’t include any directions to any of them) along with some encyclopedic type knowledge about the caves and types of caves in the state of Missouri. Though despite all of his knowledge we ended up skipping finding a cave to go spelunking in and instead headed on to a nearby state park called Elephant Rock.

To sum up Elephant Rock—it looks like a little bit of Colorado in the middle of Misery, I mean Missouri.

We hiked all over the rocks and even all the way to the opposite side of the park while we were in search of one of Jesse James’ hideouts that one of the people there told us about. He was going to give us very specific directions, but Tweedy didn’t want to hear them for some reason. Because of that we never found his old hideout, but we did find two old granite quarries that had since filled with water. If it hadn’t been sitting water we probably would have jumped in.

We stayed there until the sun dipped down below the horizon, even made some food at one of the park benches, and then we were on the road for Illinois.

For video check out these channels on YouTube: Eat2Pigs and itawtidid