Travelogue Retrospective

I went on an epic road trip with my son over the summer. A four-week, 5,300-mile loop from Tucson to Chicago and back. We went through parts of the country we'd never been to before. It was good.

Here's a sampling of memorable images from the various states we traveled through (excluding Arizona, I guess because we live here, and Kansas, since that was all in the dark).

Number one: Boulder Creek, a few miles above Boulder, CO. It rushes and roars for several miles and eventually runs into the Big Bill Williams River, which continues an ever more twisting course through jaw-dropping sheer-walled canyons that look like something out of a train set. Every curve brings more amazing rock formations and tighter squeezes between the canyon walls... then suddenly the canyon ends and you're spit out into what looks like the middle of Illinois. The river, exhausted at this point, takes a deep breath and meanders slowly across the plains toward the Mississippi.

Then there's eastern Wyoming. This is all you need to know about it:













Eastern Wyoming sucks harder than a Hoover.

After two hours of driving through Wyoming that felt like no more than six, we got to the southwestern corner of South Dakota. The guy who lives in the middle of nowhere? We found where he lives. He lives here:
















Lost Springs has one business, where the guy presumably works.

There's also a City Park, which consists of a swingset and basketball hoop in the back yard of the one house. The railroad runs past the town, which, except for the pronghorns, is all alone out on the plains.

Winter must be an interesting and solitary experience out here.