Road Trip USA – A look back at 2006

Sitting on the edge, originally uploaded by tony.eckersley.

I am going to be doing a huge day-by-day review of my road trip. I have a few aims of this mega post; 1 – for me to remember the amazing time me and wife had, 2 – to inspire others, 3 – to inspire me to do this again in the future!

So lets start right at the beginning – the story/planning.

The Year is 2006. I had been with Danielle for 14 months and were about to go to the UK for a year to complete my under graduate degree. I had finished my job with Mediastudio in the states after 17 months of constant work. This is the perfect excuse for a ROAD TRIP!

We spent a month living in the back of a 95 Dodge Dakota truck and camping at as many national parks as we could! It was a fantastic experience and one I think everyone should try and do. We saw so many incredible things and cannot wait to do it again.

Hit the jump to see and read more about our route!

Map of USA Road Trip 2006, originally uploaded by tony.eckersley.

Me and Dannie spent months and months with a Road Atlas of North America planning our best route. I had an idea in my head of the ideal Road Trip USA that I wanted to do which included visiting places like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Arches and a big bunch of other National Parks that I had wanted to go and photograph for years. Luckily, all these places seem to have been summoned over on the West Coast in close proximity with each other(well, relatively in Road Trip terms) and seemed to create an almost perfect loop. While I say it’s lucky that they are relatively close, we just so happened to live on the opposite side of the US, in Virginia! Regardless, I had my mind set on all these fantastic west coast national parks. So, with this in mind, our first real stop we figured during the planning stage would be Badlands national park in South Dakota. That meant our first stop would be 1700 miles away! Once we had gotten over the shock of a 1700 mile trip only to stop and sleep until we got there,there we were golden – our route planned itself! We could hit the Badlands, drive to Yellowstone, continue down to Grand Tetons, drive south through Salt Lake City and head west through Nevada over the salt plains and hit north California around Lake Tahoe where we would head south towards Yosemite, then start our journey back east through Vegas, hitting the North and South rim of the Grand Canyon before traveling up to Bryce Canyon and Zion and continuing east through Arches and Canyon Lands which would lead us to our last real national park of the trip – the Colorado Rockies, before we would race back to Virginia to catch a flight to the UK!! I apologize for the lack of periods there – I felt it was necessary illustrate how frantic and awesome our trip would be!

So the route was set in stone – and it had to be, Dannie had already applied a sharpie to our route in the map! Initially, I had hoped to spend a day or so in San Francisco, and kept it as a maybe throughout the trip, in case we had time, but realistically, we knew we would rather spend time else where and travel to SF another time in the comfort of a flight as apposed to 3500 miles driving. I also had an end date for work, the date we planned to head West – August 12! We had planned to Dannie’s uncle’s Nissan Titan, however, those plans fell through at the very last minute meaning we had to take Danielle’s trusty old 95 Dodge Dakota. I have to admit, I was skeptical it would survival 9000+ miles in a month, but I was assured by it’s trust owner, the future wife, that it would be fine – I mean, why would I doubt that! Because of this last minute change of plans, we decided to set off on the 13th, real early in the morning, and get a good start heading north. That was ok though, as it gave us an extra day, you know, to add a back window (yes – a back window, or else we would have to content with a large breeze for the whole trip), and give it some much needed maintenance before a big trip!

Oh, but you should have seen her all set up! It was almost too perfect. Plexiglass windows and dents aside, of course. We managed to fit a single mattress in the bed of the truck for those nights we couldn’t be bothered to set up a tent. We used the small rear seats to hold our big cooler for our food and drinks and to hold our our camping gear, spare clothes and washing stuff! We were truly ready – We had no GPS, only a road map showing all the camping areas across the states including national parks. Looking back, these maps were not great as they had very little detail! But whatever! How hard can it be?

To be continued