BroTrip IV: Los Angeles To Columbia
Since I fell behind (surprise, surprise) on keeping track of my adventure, this one will be lengthier than the previous posts. Coast to coast here we go:
Los Angeles
Upon returning from Joshua Tree, Robert went back home to the wife and kids while I meandered around town buying records and driving for the sake of reacquainting myself with my hometown. Sigh.
After meeting back up for dinner, I crashed on Robert and Leslie’s couch until 5am when I headed out the door and towards Death Valley.
Death Valley National Park
I’d like to officially go on record as saying that Highway 178 leading out of Bakersfield, CA is in my top 3 most amazing drives ever. If you ever get the chance to take that drive, do it.
The rest of the drive to and through Death Valley is incredible. So much so that I failed to realize I was in the park until I was miles outside of it. The entire time I kept thinking to myself “I need to stop getting out and taking so many pictures cause I’m never going to get to the park at this pace.”
Apparently, the park has no entrance station unlike EVERY OTHER NATIONAL PARK EVER (that I’ve been to), so I saw what I needed to see and kept driving towards Vegas.
Las Vegas (And Outside Of)
Meh. Records were absurdly overpriced.
I ended up getting there just as the sun set, and I briefly thought about staying at a hotel and gambling since I’d never done it before but…
I kept driving.
Cutting through the Arizona desert heading towards Paria Canyon Wilderness I almost ran through a…squad of deer (ok, so they’re called a ‘herd’, but ‘squad’ works so much better), froze to death at 0 degree weather, and began driving down a dirt road until I realized how foolish that was at 1:30am. So I kept driving.
Great Sand Dunes National Park (Well, The Drive To)
By the time I got to Kayenta, AZ I was dead tired so I pulled into a gas station, grabbed my sleeping bag, and slept on the same seat I had been in for the past 18–20hrs.
I woke up mid-morning to use the restroom and grab some awful coffee to aid me in my trek towards Great Sand Dunes.
Unfortunately I made the mistake of stopping at Four Corners National Monument so I could say that I had been in four states simultaneously, but after watching an endless line of people posing in the same exact way as the person before them I decided to continue on.
On this drive from AZ to CO I learned how to drive in icy conditions:
Slow. Real slow.
I’d have to say that cutting across the Rio Grande National Forest during wintertime was the most terrifying experience of this trip.
Once again, I found myself in a “hey I probably shouldn’t be doing this in a Honda Civic” situation (see: unintentional off-roading in Big Bend NP), but myself and the car pulled through despite slipping and sliding up and down mountain roads.
I ended up spending the night at a Holiday Inn in Alamosa, CO where I ate delicious Taco Bell and slept like a baby on a king-sized bed.
Great Sand Dunes National Park
Going into the park and seeing the dunes from afar I thought the hike up to the High Dune was going to be a piece of cake. I was so wrong.
What I was up against:
- 699ft of sand
- 20–30 degree weather
- Wind
- Wind blowing sand into my eyes
- Wind freezing water on my mustache
- More wind
- More sand
Upon making it to the top I realized why it was worth it. No words.
24 Hours To Mammoth Cave National Park
I can now say that I’ve driven for 24 hours straight — Great Sand Dunes NP in Colorado to Mammoth Cave NP in Kentucky.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t as terrible as it sounds.
Unlike some of my other drives where I began hallucinating and nodding off, my body went into overdrive and allowed me to once again do things I probably shouldn’t have been doing.
My timing couldn’t have been more perfect since I ended up driving through Kansas at night, which meant I missed endless miles of empty fields but saw an infinite number of stars decorating a pitch-black sky.
I will say that it is weird to be able to smell cows but not see them though.
The rest of the drive was fairly uneventful save for trying to stop in St. Louis to see the Arch but not doing so, and failing to realize I had to drive through Illinois and Indiana to get to my destination.
Mammoth Cave National Park
I thought about camping through the night at the park but upon arriving at the campground and realizing how cold it was and how underprepared for cold-weather camping I was…I ended up at another motel.
This was at 3pm on Dec. 31st. I proceeded to fall asleep until 9am the next day, effectively missing the New Year coming in. Oh well.
In the morning I drove back into the park and took a tour of the cave, which was fun but left me feeling like there was so much more of it that I wanted to explore. I’m hoping to return this summer and take a more extensive tour, as well as camp and do river activities.
Home.
It had been two weeks since I embarked on my adventure, so needless to say I was ready to be home.
The drive from Mammoth Cave to Columbia, SC was a fairly easy 8 hour trip (including a coffee stop in Nashville,TN).
The highlights of the drive:
- Startling an older gentleman at a gas station with a highly audible “oh shit!” upon realizing I threw my keys in the trash instead of the actual trash.
- Getting wired off a combination of coffee and Monster. Enough so that I almost convinced myself I could sing like King Diamond. I can’t.
- Pulling into my driveway and realizing my house hadn’t been broken into.
And so at 12:04am on January 2nd, 2016 my adventure had come to an end.