Starling Travel

07-26-18: WI Trip Day 12: Green River to STG

07-25-18: WI Trip Day 11: Limon, CO to Green River, UT

07-24-18: WI Trip Day 10: Salina KS to Limon, CO

07-23-18: WI Trip Day 9: Amana Colonies to Salina, KS

07-22-18: WI Trip Day 8: MKE to Amana Colonies with a visit to The House on the Rock. So… many…pictures!!! I didn’t post them all!

I really love this motivational poster I saw on Facebook a while back:

It reads:

Go at least once a year to a place you have never been before.

This is an argument that I have every year with Mike. He always wants to go to Yellowstone, which we have been to almost every year for a decade. I want to try new national parks, like Yosemite. This year, we didn’t go on a big trip. Our biggest trip was to Lagoon Amusement Park up north. It was a really fun vacation and we got to see our friends and family while we were there, so no regrets.

Still, the argument rages on. Yellowstone or Yosemite. Mike argues that Yellowstone is different EVERY time we go there. I can hardly describe the difference of Mammoth Hot Springs now versus when we saw it that first time together. I wish I had photos of Orange Spring Mound from that first trip because it has LITERALLY taken over the road and they have had to make a new road around its massive orangeness. Yellowstone is truly different every time we’ve visited from the year with the ten foot snow drifts to the year with the bear with a porcupine quill in its paw. We have never had a repeat experience.

But I have never seen Yosemite. I would feel like an idiot if I never got to see the mountains and trees that so inspired John Muir in his writing and activism. I would regret never seeing El Capitan in person when it was the focus on so many of Ansel Adams’ photographs. How can I keep visiting Yellowstone over and over when Yosemite is there, waiting for me to visit?

Then again, Ansel Adams spent his whole life visiting Yosemite over and over. Georgia O’Keefe loved Taos so much she moved down there. Additionally, every time I visit a place, it looks different to me because I AM DIFFERENT. What was boring to me as a child is gorgeous to me as an adult. What was interesting to me before may be gone, but has been replaced with something just as strange and captivating. When our national parks are different every time we visit them, it doesn’t matter which one we visit as long as we get out.

If I were to change that poster on the top, I would make it MUCH more simple. Instead of it saying, “Go at least once a year to a place you have never been before,” it was only say, “GO.”

I adore road trips, but I have read very few books in which the characters go on a road trip. In fact, of all the books mentioned in this obsessively detailed map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips from Atlas Obscura, I have read NONE of them. NONE…

Here is the list of books:

• Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
• The Cruise of the Rolling Junk by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes by Ted Conover
• Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins
• Cross Country by Robert Sullivan
• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson
• Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Roughing It by Mark Twain
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
• Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

If you are unable to travel this year, take a trip in your mind with one of these books. I’m sure there is one here that will give you the feeling of being somewhere else.

Via Engadget – ​This interactive map crams in American literature’s greatest road trips

This old General Motors video about how a road trip would be in the future of 1976 is painful to watch at first, but there are some interesting things about it that I wish were true.

If you can get past the singing and spoken poetry, then you’ll get to see the interesting ideas for the future of road trips. The car that drives itself is the first dream for the future that never came to be. Here’s a picture of the “Electronic Control Strip” that supposedly drives the cars.

Google has been working on a car that drives itself for a long time now and we still haven’t seen it.

The idea of having a car that dispenses ice cream and sodas seems a bit over-the-top. Not even the high-end RVs have that. It would be cool, though.

I really like this fold-down tray, though. Why don’t we have these in the back of cars.

I love the design of these roads. It looks like it was set in a futuristic Zion’s Park.

When the family got tired, the “Tower Man” recommended a hotel for them. At least we have a similar thing to this with all the information on the Internet.

On a whole, this vision of 1976 was WAY better than the real 1976, but pales in comparison to now. I’m pretty happy with how the future turned out and no 1956 concept of the future can compare to it.

Via: A Family of Singing Time-Travelers Drive the Highways of Tomorrow

I love this photo from Happy Trails on Flickr.

Here’s what he says:

This is the cover of a journal type book I bought several years back. I’ve been using it to document all the trips I take in the ’72 LeMans I own that my Grandma bought new. I have some old trip logs of hers from when the car was new just documenting gas stops, but I wish there were more details. I don’t ever plan to sell this car so maybe my daughter who will end up with the car someday will find it interesting to go back and read where the car has been during the time I owned it.

(It’s too bad they used an Interstate shield rather than the old style highway sign shield, but, it’s still cool – I’d sure like to own that trailer).

We have suddenly found ourselves with a fifth grader in our house and now planning for our next camping trip is entirely different than I thought it would be. What do I do with him in the car? The drive to our camping destination is over four hours away, so I have to have something to keep him busy while we’re on our long trip.

I’m so thankful for this website:

• Mom’s Minivan: Travel Bingo and Many other PRINTABLE Car Games to play in the car

She not only has travel bingo and ideas for the license plate game, but she had printables for things I would have never thought of like a scavenger hunt, battleship and even song lyrics. Hopefully, with enough of these sorts of distractions, we’ll keep our new fifth grader busy and entertained while we get to the campground. Once we’re there, that’s another story.