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Previous Roadtrips > 1980-1984
Previous
Road Trips:
1980
- 1984
My
family has always enjoyed traveling, and for that I'm thankful. My father was a professor
at Michigan State University and each summer he'd lead our family on a roadtrip
across North America for weeks on end. I'm still not sure how he managed
to squeeze five kids, two adults, all of our stuff, and an occasional pet
into our red Dodge station wagon. We usually
camped since we couldn't afford to stay in motels. That was O.K. with us
kids, though, since we all preferred camping, as I still do. While my
mother probably didn't embrace camping as much as the rest of us, she put up a
good front. The
summer traveling tradition continued after our family moved to San Jose,
California, when I was eight years old. By that time, the wanderlust seed
had been planted.
When
I went to college at Riverside in southern California, I majored in Geography
because I was fascinated with maps and traveling. By this time, I'd visited
most of the 50 states on family trips. I took my first, brief solo camping
trip during my junior year in 1980 and really
enjoyed it. Two of my most memorable roadtrips, however, were week-long,
spring-break treks to the desert southwest in 1981 and 1982 with my then-girlfriend, Katy. As
I discovered during those trips, the Southwest was
unbelievably beautiful and has since remained my favorite part of the U.S.
In
1982, I graduated from U.C. Riverside and, since recruiters weren't battering
down the doors of graduating geographers, I went to grad school at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison. The next summer, I became a seasonal ranger in the Colorado Rockies, a
terrific job which I returned to for five more years. By the way, in the
early 1980s, my parents moved from San Jose to Portland, Oregon, and Portland
became my new home base when I wasn't working in Colorado or going to grad school in
Madison.
My
Road Trips: 1980 - 1984
Above
left: "Park
Avenue" in Arches National Park, Utah, during
my second trip to the Southwest with Katy
in 1982. I was awestruck by the incredible beauty
of the Colorado Plateau, and remain so to
this day.
Above
right: My
college buddy, Jake, at 0 degrees in Madison, giving a "thumbs up" before our comical
drive from Wisconsin to Portland in December,
1983.
Too cheap and macho
(i.e., stupid) to stay in a motel, we slept in sleeping
bags in the back
of his truck during the first night
in South Dakota. That night, the
temperature dropped to 25 degrees below zero.
Yep, we got
a motel room the next night
and I slept on the floor, right next to the heater and the truck's battery.
Previous Road Trips:
Road
Trips: 1980 - 1984
Road
Trips: 1985
- 1989
Road
Trips: 1990
- 1994
Road
Trips: 1995
- 1999
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