A Cross-Country Road Trip: The Journey
Hello! Welcome back! I’m glad you’re here today!
The holidays are ramping up and I’m looking forward to doing some super festive activities like seeing the Nutcracker and moseying around holiday light displays! I love celebrating anything, and this time of year gets the most attention and festive spirit and I’m here for it.
I also promised you a story about a road trip. I touched on it a bit during the gratitude challenge last month and I thought perhaps I should give you the whole story. Today we are touching on the physical journey. This trip is loaded with emotional baggage and I started to realize that each side needed to have its own post as I was writing this out. So let’s start with the easier side and focus on the journey itself.
The itinerary goes: Indianapolis – North Liberty, IA – Kearney, NE – Denver, CO – Green River, UT – Las Vegas, NV – Los Angeles
I had two weeks in between cruise ship contracts to pack up my life, move it to Iowa, and then get my butt across the rest of the country to essentially park my car at another friend’s place and hop on a plane to the east coast again. (Los Angeles to Bayonne, NJ)
Friends who helped me pack the van up because I couldn’t do it on my own. They were taking a little break in some funny positions.
I was driving from Indianapolis to North Liberty, Iowa where I stored my things with a friend (the one mentioned from my gratitude challenge.) It was my first time driving a uHaul or any type of truck at all plus I had a car dolly attached to the back of it. I was running late. I stopped at my local gas station before hopping onto the highway and unfortunately, winter really beat up the pavement all around it. The dolly’s wheel immediately blew out and I had a flat tire before even getting on the road. Waiting for roadside assistance on a Sunday put me behind by about 3 hours and I spent most of the trip driving in the dark with snow still falling. So I showed up close to midnight and had to offload and return the truck and dolly the next day. I spent a couple of days with her to decompress from the intensity of moving and driving a uHaul two states over and, a few major life changes to process too.
We process using facial care products because crying your skin raw is a real thing.
Endless flatness. Everywhere.
Next was driving to Kearney, NE. I packed up my car with my suitcases and the essentials I needed to do my cruise contracts and left in my little red ford focus for Nebraska. My mother told me that my grandfather was stationed there during WWII for a time so I was curious to pass through it. But I didn’t get to enjoy the area much since I didn’t have enough time (or money) to be a tourist in the area. I stayed at the Rodeway Inn, which is only really good for a quick overnight stay. I remember the bed being very hard and feeling lucky the room was clean. The hotel needed a major refurb pretty badly.
The drive between Kearney and Denver was windy but also amusing for me. I saw my first tumbleweeds in the area of the country. Up to that point I believed that tumbleweeds only existed in Loony Tunes cartoons from my childhood. I wasn’t the only person who found novelty in seeing tumbleweeds. I saw a couple of other people pulled over on the highway taking photos and even collecting one into their car to take with them. I also discovered how dangerous tumbleweeds are to a vehicle. I thought the brush would be comprised of softer grass-like textures but its really a giant bush that’s lost all of its leaves that dislodges from the ground and rolls away. It’s a ball of very thick sticks. Which will screw up your car if you’re driving at highway speeds. So, that was a revelation. It was also during this leg of the trip I decided to completely abandon listening to the radio and start listening to an audiobook. Best. Decision. Ever.
The Colorado mountains way far off in the distance.
Denver was gorgeous. I could see the mountain range coming up hours before I even got into town. Those mountains are so beautiful and it was a really cool contrast from the flat plains I had been looking at since I left Iowa. The mountains also marked the end of the type of landscape I was familiar with seeing my whole life because what lay on the other side of those mountains was completely different from anything I’ve ever seen. Here I stayed at Howard Johnson Denver West. It was a drastic improvement from what Rodeway offered in Kearney. The room was more spacious, the reception desk wasn’t inside of a closet, and the hotel had seen an update in the last decade. There was also some big box stores within walking distance that I could go to to stretch my legs and buy some supplies for the nigh and for the rest of the trip. The area around the hotel and just before entering the mountains was really beautiful. The air was clean and it was obvious the community was really proud of their city and it’s natural features. (Who wouldn’t be?)
From Denver, I drove to Green River, UT. The mountains still had snow so I had to be extra careful when driving. I remember just thinking to myself the whole time “Thank goodness I didn’t try to do this in a uHaul.” I would have spent a fortune on gas just in the mountain range alone aside from the fact that I didn’t want to do steep inclines in a truck that I didn’t know or trust. There were all kinds of mountainside lodges and places to stay that I could see from the road and I told myself “one day I’ll come back and stay there.” Those places looked so beautiful. At the top of the mountain there was snow, and down at the bottom of the valley it was a warm spring time. This is where I took that valley selfie seen here.
On the other side of the mountain range was Utah. And it was such a shock to see such a drastically different landscape before me that I wondered if sci-fi movies chose Utah as a good spot for Mars-inspired locations. I really felt like I was on another planet. Little did I know that I-70 drives right through a national and a state park on the way to Green River. Oh. Honestly though it was gorgeous and aside from my constant anxiety of not finding a gas station when I might truly need one, I enjoyed this leg of the trip very much. The speed limits are a suggestion since literally no one is on the highway in this area of the country. The max speed limit was 80 mph and I learned my car doesn’t like to go above 90 mph without starting to rattle in protest. I kept it to 85 after I performed that small test of my car’s abilities.
Green River had my favorite hotel stay of the whole trip. The hotel was named “Skyfall Guestrooms” and they had exactly 3 guest rooms hidden away underneath their main restaurant. Each room had a panoramic window with a view of the green river and some patio chairs just outside the door. The inside was furnished almost entirely with higher end IKEA furniture but I really liked it. It felt more like home to me being in that kind of room. It had a giant television with streaming access and even a white noise speaker and fan next to the bed for those sensitive to sounds at night. It was a really well though out and beautiful space and it was very restorative to my mental health. I felt incredibly safe in the space in a way I hadn’t felt in years.
After Green River, I was headed toward Las Vegas. Once I left the state and national parks I really started to see some spaces that reflected the iconic and historical style of the “old west.” I think I stopped for gas in the middle of my drive and I remember chuckling to myself seeing the exact kind of architecture and rustic environment that I thought was a stereotype of the west being somewhat true. Also that the gas prices were starting to creep up dramatically and being shocked by that too.
In Las Vegas, I stayed away from the strip. My car was very obviously packed full of stuff and I didn’t want a drunk opportunist to look at my car and get ideas about exploring the inside of it. I had visited the strip when I was 20 and didn’t feel a huge need to explore while I was cutting through town. However, I did find out that a friend of mine from my first Royal Caribbean contract was doing the rigging program in Vegas, so she came to visit me in my hotel and we feasted on sushi delivery and chatted the evening away. I stayed in La Quinta Suites near the airport. It was a standard hotel room with all of the bells and whistles. They met all my needs and expectations and it was a pleasant stay but nothing notable to mention regarding the hotel itself.
Finally from Vegas I drove to Los Angeles. My biggest concerns during this leg of the trip was the heat in the middle of the desert especially at midday. I was worried my car might overheat. This drive was a leap of faith for many reasons, one of them also being I did not have car insurance or health insurance or literally any insurance at the time. I’ll explain why next week, but as you can see it’s a big reason for why I was so nervous through this whole trip.
Approaching LA, I started to see more greenery and vegetation after 2 days of desert. Being from the Midwest I noticed how happy it made me to see the foliage growing as I got into LA. I was also annoyed and nervous with all of the traffic as well. It took longer than google anticipated for me to get through it because I got into town in the middle of rush hour. (Ugh.) I met up with my friend and got set up on her sofa and unpacked much of my car. The next day we went to Santa Monica pier and I said hello to the Pacific Ocean from the California coast from the first time. (I did it once from the Japanese coast years before.) It was fun. The ocean felt like home to me, and it was rejuvenating. The day after visiting Santa Monica Pier, I hopped on a plane and flew to Bayonne, NJ for my next cruise ship and said hello to the Atlantic Ocean. I did not miss the silliness of that instance at all.
NYC Skyline circa 2018
And that is how my cross-country road trip went (generally.) It was scary, but also freeing. I made a new start in a new place with more career opportunities, and I do not regret the choice I made. It was the catalyst for so many more positive changes in my life that I had not met yet but knew could be there. So if you are faced with the choice to leap into the unknown for the betterment of your future and your life but it seems scary and impossible? Try anyway. Something amazing might be just on the other side of it. I did it with very little money to spare and a few helping hands.
See you next week with the rest of the emotional story connected to this trip.
Kristen
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