Wednesday, October 4, 2023

2023 Fall Trip - Wrap-up of 21 Days - Lessons Learned

One week after finishing - Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023 - Thoughts on my Fall 2023 Road Trip. The Route, and Raw Numbers are that I drove 9,143 miles over 21 days:

If you look at "averages", I averaged 435 miles-per-day. That is a totally managable number, with daylight-driving each day. It is a comfortable pace, offering the opportunities to stop at "Scenic Views" and collecting Post Offices.

In this case, however, I "Drove Big" for 15 days (8,649 miles, averaging 577 miles-per-day) [leaving 6 days "Driving Little" totaled 494 miles, averaging 83 miles-per-day].

That "577 miles-per-day" was too much. I wound up driving one/two/or even three hours in the dark, which I don't like to do - one main purpose of my trips is to "see the lay of the land". Needless to say, that doesn't happen IN THE DARK!

My constraints for this trip were:

1) I didn't want to be away from home (and my Beautiful Bride) for more than 21 days, and

2) I wanted to hike 7 days in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains (well hike for 6, and day-of-rest for 1).

So, given those two factors, this trip WORKED OUT PERFECTLY! And I don't plan on doing it again.

Maybe my new motto should be "Drive Less, See More."

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Mid-Blog Break - let's see SOME BEAUTY: Jackson Pollock in Buffalo:

J.M.W. Turner at Oberlin:

Alone Out There:

California Sunset:

Heart Lake:

Kearsarge Pass:

Bristlecone Pine:

Bishop Lake:

Ruby Lake:

Upper Lamarck Lake:

Lake Tahoe:

Desolation in Nevada:

Counting Crows in Idaho:

Snake River in Idaho:

Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming:

Maxwell, Nebraska:

Dixon, Iowa:

HOME:

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Another "Lesson Learned" is that I really like Hostels (or at least The Hostel California). They are a great place to get a communal sense, and the kids (yeah, everyone is younger than me) are all healthy, either coming off a Big Hike, or about to start one. I definitely want to keep "Hostel" on my list of places-to-stay:

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I really like the caltopo maps. I think they are better-looking than AllTrails
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I'm working through coming to terms with the increasing-joy I get "hunting Post Offices" versus the lessening-joy of "visiting Art Museum". Although I love The Art that I see in the museums, it seems to be quite a hassle dealing with them (timed-entry, parking, layout problems - not to mention THE HUGE AMOUNT OF BAD ART that is taking up wallspace/floorspace).

With Post Offices, I get off The Interstate Highway unto a well-defined US Highway System that runs right through towns that The Interstate Highway System has abandoned. The Primary Highways going through the Great Plains states are I-80 and I-70, and I know what they are like. The "red box" is blown-up below, and shows 53 Post Offices - it puts a smile on my face thinking about figuring out how to zig-zag and get them all:
It reminds me of a "Hubble Space Telescope zoom-in" that I saw the other day:

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And finally, it has been 2 years since I did an overnight (= camping in a tent) hike ("Glacier National Park"). I know I said that I don't want to do that again, but I've recently been reading about some really cool multi-day hikes, and just pulled out a map I made a couple of years ago, for a 3-day/2-night hike in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho
We'll see...

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