On the Road Again

Publication date for this blog is day three on a forty-seven-day road trip wandering from our place in Savannah to our home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Before we arrive home, we will have traveled in at least twenty states (probably twenty-two) and one Canadian province. The car’s odometer will have recorded an additional 6,500-7,000 miles. We’ll have driven well over 100 hours; some of the hours will be bogeying on interstates, more will be wandering what William Least-Heat Moon has forever labeled for me as “blue highways.”

We designed our route from Georgia to Oregon to visit as many National Wildlife Refuges as we have time for. I’ll check off a bucket list item when we catch the sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) migration as it hourglasses at the Platte River.

As many as a quarter-million cranes pour into the Platte region as they move up from the bottom of the hourglass encompassing the Gulf of Mexico through Arizona, pinch at the Platte and spread across northern North America. (There are other sandhill crane flyways in North America, but this is by far the largest.) We’ll be there at the end of the migration, so we’ll see how many cranes are still around given the early warm Spring in that part of Nebraska.

In Oregon I’ll spend six days improving my writing skills at the Donald Maass workshop while Jan tours the area around Mt. Hood and visits friends in Portland. On the second portion of the trip we’ll catch family in St. Paul, Minnesota; I’ll participate in a bridge tournament at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin while Jan visits family in Highland Park, Illinois; we’ll visit more family in Rochester, New York and some of Jan’s childhood friends in Lansing, Michigan.

Given the early warm weather, we expect mud season will be over by the time we reach home. If not, we’ll add an extension onto our trip until we can drive in the last fourteen miles of logging roads to our place!

I plan to take a photograph every fifty miles, no matter where we are. The process will provide a visual record of the topography and vegetation changes as we move up from twelve feet above sea level across the Appalachians, back down into the Mississippi drainage, up into the plains, over the Rockies, and back down toward sea level as we reach the West Coast areas. The only gaps in our photographic recording will be when we drive at night.

If you want to follow the trip, I’ll be posting on my personal Facebook page, and I expect to add more pictures using my personal blog My Two Cents (Before Inflation).

So come along with us on the trip, if you wish. I’ve discovered our friends fall into two camps: those who think this is a marvelous idea and those who think we are bloomin’ crazy. Which group do you fall into?

~ Jim