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My 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 exactly 0 degrees F 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.
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