22 days.
16 states.
7,800 miles.
I just got back from a very long run, from Indiana to the West Coast and back again in a giant oval loop. I was driving a young Amish newlywed couple that I have known for around 10 years, I used to tease them about liking each other when they were younger and now they finally got married. During our trip we drove through:
Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa.
I am not counting Indiana since we live there nor Utah even though I technically was in Utah when we stopped at the Four Corners monument and walked through the four different states. During the trip I finally went through the last of the lower 48 states that I hadn’t been to (Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon).
Before heading out on my little adventure to drive an Amish newlywed couple on their honeymoon, I decided I would do a travelogue to publish on our return so you, the people, can enjoy my travels vicariously.
They rented a Mercedes Benz diesel van, it has room for 15 passengers and it has a large cargo area which is good because if Amish women haven’t learned anything, they haven’t learned how to pack without taking everything they own although they also wanted to do laundry every other day. Washing clothes is such a part of their lives that they feel weird if they aren’t doing it I guess. This is the van with Mount Rainier in Washington in the background:
98% of the time it ran like a champ, it only had around 20,000 miles when we got it, but especially in the mountains I would suddenly lose power and couldn’t accelerate at all, the pedal would go right to the floor but nothing happened. If I stopped and restarted the motor it usually went right away so that was annoying but when it ran it got over 20 miles to the gallon which is great for an enormous vehicle like that.
I was going to do a day by day recap but I ended up not having anywhere near enough time to keep track so I am going to just give you the highlights.
The first couple of days were mostly driving, you have to get through the Midwestern states to get to the big national parks and the coast of course, so we trekked along through Chicongo, SW Wisconsin and then along the southern edge of Minnesota and South Dakota. The wind was incredible, the Mercedes van has something called crosswind assist which means that when you were hit with a crosswind the van would hit the brakes and jerk the wheel. What an awesome feature when you are driving 75 MPH! Of course you can’t turn it off. It is one of the many “safety” features that are only necessary for people who shouldn’t be driving in the first place.
We stopped at Badlands National Park in South Dakota which lives up to the name and then went to Mount Rushmore.
The next day we drove to Devils Tower in Wyoming which is pretty cool and then on to and through Yellowstone.
We stayed overnight on the west side of the park and then went back in the following day to see Old Faithful and some of the other sights. We saw a couple of bear and a really big bull elk plus lots of lady elk, mule deer, and bison.
Following Yellowstone we drove up to Whitefish, Montana and stayed at an Airbnb for a few days. Nice place but it was on top of a small mountain so it took a long time just to drive up the switchbacks to get to it. The morning view….
Glacier National Park was pretty cool, did the Going To The Sun road thing and also a boat tour on Lake McDonald, it was pretty foggy but still cool.
We saw almost no wildlife in Glacier which was disappointing. When we left the park on the east side we drove through an Indian reservation and saw a prairie fire being fought, and then went through the reservation itself. Let me say, casino niggers are just about as bad as regular niggers. Trashy trailers, feral skanky dogs running loose, garbage everywhere. That whole “Indians revere the land” bullshit is just that, bullshit. Whenever we saw a reservation we saw casinos, trashy trailer houses and Indians selling overpriced Injun trinkets to White people.
We left the Airbnb and then stopped at an Amish community in Montana, that was pretty interesting, before heading West. Our next stop was Mount Rainier so we made it as far as Yakima, Washington for the night and the part we stayed in looked like a dystopian movie with drug addicts stumbling around the streets. The town was gross.
Mount Rainier on the other hand was spectacular.
We shot over to the coast and drove down along the Pacific, staying in Astoria, Oregon. Then we went to a redwood sawmill that had something like 35-40 million log feet of redwoods which is a whole ton of lumber. A local big Amish sawmill has around 3 million log feet in their log yard at a given time by way of comparison. We also did the Redwood National Forest thing and saw some pretty big dang trees.
From there we travelled down the coast, did a whale watching boat ride from Monterrey, California and then went to Kings Canyon one day and Yosemite the next. It has been pretty dry there so the big waterfall in Yosemite wasn’t running so that was disappointing.
Our travels next took us through Death Valley where it was 105 degrees at night when we went through and it isn’t a place I will likely visit again. We stayed in a town called Beatty, Nevada that has wild burros just wandering around town like this guy who was eating from a gas station garbage can.
The next place on the agenda was the Grand Canyon which was cool and all but again not something I feel a burning desire to see again.
That was followed by a stop at the Four Corners monument where we were ripped off by the Indians again. That night we stayed in Durango, Colorado and the next day the older Amish took a train to Silverton and the younger ones did a Jeep tour. We drove the “Million Dollar Highway” which was incredibly scenic but not as nerve wracking as I had expected.
The last big day was in Cañon City, Colorado that was another split deal with the kids doing whitewater rafting in the Royal Gorge while the older folks did another train ride. It’s a pretty spectacular scene.
At this point we were about out of time so we headed northeast into Nebraska, then into Iowa where we had a delightful dinner cruise on the Mississippi River aboard the Celebration Belle launched from Moline, Illinois. Prime rib dinner followed by a leisurely evening cruise down the ol’ Mississippi.
After that it was just driving east, while we had perfect weather nearly the entire 3 weeks of the trip, it went sideways in Illinois and Indiana with thunderous rainstorms much of the way home. I got in last night and have been trying to recover since.
Some thoughts.
First and foremost: there are way too many people in America.
The number of apartment buildings being slapped together in Denver was incredible. Everywhere we went there was traffic and hordes of people, and far too many of them were mestizos and curry niggers. We saw this lovely sign when we stopped at an overlook to take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I wonder if they had those signs when California was mostly White? You can’t even go look at a miracle of engineering like the Golden Gate Bridge without your car being broken into. We skipped stuff like Alcatraz for the same reason. Thanks Gavin Newsome!
As far as the national parks. They are a testament to the foresight of earlier Americans, setting aside these amazing places for generations of Americans to enjoy. If you think that sentiment is “liberal”, you don’t understand what it means to be actually right-wing.
Yellowstone was my favorite park, Glacier and Yosemite were pretty impressive but we didn’t see much wildlife and that is what I like to see as much as amazing vistas. Kings Canyon and the Redwoods were cool, Death Valley was horrible and the Grand Canyon kinda meh.
As for my fellow park goers? We were after Labor Day so most families were back in school, leaving lots of old White people and foreigners. A ton of people were driving those converted Mercedes, Dodge and Ford vans you can camp in which seem cool. A word about the foreigners, mostly elephant jockeys and Asians with a weirdly large number of Germans….
Maybe it shouldn’t but it irritated the hell out of me to see various non-White foreigners wandering around stuff White people built like Mount Rushmore and the Hoover Dam, jabbering in their monkey languages, and taking selfies. I just don’t want them here at all and especially not clogging up our parks making it less pleasant for actual Americans to enjoy them.
In the end, while we don’t have majestic mountains or oceans, I still would rather be in Indiana. I missed being home terribly and I was incredibly happy to see cornfields and buggies and the people who stayed behind, especially of course my wife who did my work while I was gone.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled racism.
Too bad you didn’t see Whitefish 20 years ago! Much nicer, still had a small town feel. Damn place has become Aspen Lite. I live about 30 miles north of Whitefish up 93. Im curious if the Amish community you visited there was up in the West Kootenai? You would have gone over a bridge on Lake Koocanusa. I’ve bought a lot of furniture up there and they have a great restaurant for weekend breakfast and dinner.
I’m happy for the newlyweds (have lots of babies) and glad you made it back safely.
Even ten years ago it was much nicer before the show Yellowstone and Covid hit so was my town as well…
If one doesn’t have a problem keeping a vehicle between the white lines under normal circumstances, then driving even the back roads of the Rockies isn’t really a big deal.
The above assertion has provided zero solace to my decidedly flat-lander wife.
I wish I’d known you were going to be in Monterey, Arthur! It’s just an hour down the road from me – I’d have made the trip to just meet you in person and shake your hand!
And to answer your question about the signs in SF – NO, we absolutely did not have signs like that when we were more pale out here. It’s been a downhill slide for the last 20 years, but things really reached a crescendo at the tail end of the Plague and seem to get worse by the day. It is a hell of a bridge though!!! Astonishing to think about the men that built that sucker without all the modern conveniences construction workers have these days. I pretty much avoid SF as much as possible these days, but I can’t help but be awed by the Golden Gate every time I cross it.
Wait…. “I was driving a young Amish newlywed couple that I have known for around 10 years…” So this young couple was on their honeymoon and brought the family?? Wow-the Amish are different…..
I am very resentful of all of the “foreigners” who constantly and consistently suck any pleasure out of seeing our own country. What with leaving their trash, the screaming kids……….yeah. NO, Kommiefornia did not have signs like the GG does now. People went and enjoyed and viewed the amazing water and engineering. Again-this is why we cannot have nice things in this country anymore. Remember in the dark, old times….when the family would take an afternoon drive and just look and see? And everyone had fun and learned stuff and everyone came home happy? Again….another joy sacrificed on the alter of Kultural Di-ver-si-tay America. The national parks are a treasure that most countries wish that they had. Glad you had a good time, even with speed traveling.
I’ll never go down the Million Dollar Highway again if I can help it. It’s been 13 years and I still vividly remember looking straight down a few thousand feet on my side of the car where there was no guardrail. I guess it’s better when you’re driving, over by the centerline, than when you’re riding next to the dropoff.
At the Grand Canyon (much longer ago) the only thing I saw was a big brown ditch
Mountains used to impress me, I grew up in hilly country, but I learned to appreciate the flatlands and now I find them as scenic as anywhere. Northern Indiana is a gem if you ask me (before Halloween and after Easter)
You can tell when you’ve left civilized America.
Of the vacations I’ve taken (and it’s been a long time now), the scenery I enjoyed most was up in South Dakota and Montana. The Black Hills, Badlands, Needles Highway, the massive open emerald green summer prairies and gentle hills of Montana (with a multitude of abandoned in place wooden railroad trestles over creeks and gullys, which I found interesting, since railroad infrastructure is so seldom abandoned outright and pulled up; at least in my AO). Rushmore was impressive from an engineering standpoint, but I’m far more taken by the naturally occuring scenic wonders.
Western Colorado rates a close second for natural beauty, but that place has been ruined by the influx of so many shitlibs that I don’t know if I could bring myself to go out there again. Took a family trip there in 1982, which is one of my fondest childhood memories. It’s funny too, that about a week ago, I had an incredibly vivid dream one night in which I more or less relived that trip in condensed form, almost like watching a real time rebroadcast of it via camera footage that duplicated my POV.
Thinking about it now, it’s incredible the amount of detail that was present in that dream, being reconstructed entirely from the memories of a then 8 year old me, 43 years ago now. Places, faces, meals (even including the name of restaurants we went to only once; Esteban’s Mexican, and The Last Chance Saloon pizza place in Keystone, The Hunky Dory Restaurant in Dillon, on the second floor of a strange strip mall type building) and entire conversations that took place. Even strangely specific insignificant things like stopping at an ancient Delano gas station and getting a can of Welch’s grape soda out of a vending machine, or going to City Market (grocery store) and buying frosted strawberry pop-tarts for breakfast. Even the house with a grass roof that the time share condo we stayed in at Keystone for a few days overlooked at the rear. Went to CO again in 1993, and certainly had a much greater appreciation for what I saw there as a young adult. Oddly, that trip isn’t quite as memorable as the one we took in 82, but nostalgia is one hell of a drug. Pardon my brief sojourn into recollecting better times.
I grew up in north Denver, and I will never set foot in the state again. Enemy held territory.
The Wet Mountains down south and the Holy Cross wilderness area past Minturn were favorite backpacking destinations back when I was young enough for that and Colorado wasn’t communist enough to make living there enjoyable.
Indeed. Denver was quasi-tolerable when I went through it in 93. Most memorable aspect of that leg of the trip was a stop at Casa Bonita. Now it is just another shithole big city on its way to being a near duplicate of Baltimore or Chicago. Needless to say, Denver was just a 1 day stop over en route. Most of that trip was spent west of the Rockies, which was still very nice (at least to my perception) 32 years ago.
I do lament the fact I will probably never get to see those areas again, the natural beauty was remarkable. There is beauty in nature close to home as well, but not the vast, unspoiled (undeveloped) swathes of it as was found in Western CO when I was last out there. I’d go back to South Dakota and Montana, and finally check out Idaho in a heartbeat, if I wasn’t so tied down with work and other commitments at home. One of these days, I’ll just stay fuck it, and decide to take a vacation.
Of course, there is also the present reality that shit seems poised to pop off (in terms of larger scale conflict) and I’d much prefer to be close to home when it does for ease of access to resources, family, and friends. Being many hundreds (or more) of miles from home base when things go pear shaped is not a scenario I wish to find myself in. Especially if there are sudden issues with access to food, fuel and funds. Even if well provisioned (as I typically would be) I don’t go on a normal road trip planning for a Mad Max scenario.
I’m with you on keeping close to home. If “vacation” is reduced to getting a decent steak at a restaurant and a day at the rodeo, so be it.
Traveled to Vegas for my son’s wedding about 30 years ago. Saw the Grand Canyon on the way back, not as spectacular as I thought it might be. Stopped at a nice Air Force museum on the way back to IH 40, saw a really nice Mig 15 and some other neat planes. Remember thinking the American Indian reservations were a good way to have savages without having to import them. Refused to go into CA, told my GF she needed to drive to Vegas to meet me which she did. Was glad to return to Texas after the weekend was over.
Shooter
As someone who loved “Close Encounters” as a kid, Devil’s Tower has always held a fascination for me. Once, I was on a flight from Tokyo to Detroit and after waking from a nap, I noticed on the flight map that we were above Devil’s Tower. I opened the window screen and fortunately it was a crystal clear day and I could see the concentric outline of the tower below. Some day I’ll have to get out there and see it from ground level.
As for foreigners, you have to experience what Niagara Falls, Canada is like these days. Wall to wall curry niggers. I don’t know which ones I dislike more, the ones with their Apu-like accents or those with the rounded vowels of someone born in Canada.
Thanks for the travelogue, Art. Sad to say it, but ‘vicariously’ is how I enjoy the sights, now that the country and most of the world has gone to shit, due solely to shitty populations. Crowds make me very claustrophobic, and I avoid cities, all cities, like the damned plagues that they are.
Foreigners doing touristy things is nothing at all new. Having grown up on Long Island and lived there for over half a century, midway between Manhattan and the Hamptons, foreign tourists passing through was a given all my life. Last time my wife and I took the LIRR into the city for dinner and a Broadway play (pre-pandemic) there were so few legacy White Americans anywhere on our journey that it was easy to imagine that we’d left the U.S. and fallen into some diverse nightmare.
I’m glad to have had the somewhat limited travel experiences we managed before the madness and rot metastasized. We rode bicycles across the Golden Gate Bridge, took a Jeep tour in Sedona, walked the waterfront in Charleston and visited Fort Sumpter, hiked the Freedom Trail in Boston, enjoyed seeing the wild mustangs of the Outer Banks, visited the Alamo here in my adopted state of Texas. Never did much of the national parks or Pacific NW, but now maybe there is no need to, thanks to your fine report.
America as it used to be is just a memory now. So are most of my dreams of traveling it.
More nigger shenanigans after being let out of jail by this jewish system we live under…
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/debisa-ephraim-university-northern-colorado-gun-search/
And to go along with the nigger fun and games, some wacko, who I’m positive is a lefty and probably either a tranny or has one at home, shoots up a Dallas ICE facility killing 1 Detainee! and seriously wounding 2 more. Didn’t hit any cops. Stranger and stranger. Cartridges with crap scribbled on them… The Deep State has pulled the Super Advanced Fuckery book off the shelf apparently. Makes me feel like sleeping until morning then going and getting my Mossberg 88 out of hock.
https://www.fox4news.com/news/dallas-ice-shooting-joshua-jahn-motive
Shooter
Yea it’s interesting times we live in for sure Brother and if you were Tribe Brother you wouldn’t have to ever put guns in hock…
Eh, sorry for the confusion brother, when I say hock, I actually mean layaway. I don’t ever pawn guns, that’s a nono. Right this moment, I’ve got the 88, the Wyatt Earp 45LC and a Browning BPS on layaway. 88 is bought tomorrow as is a Taurus 856 I’m getting for the grandson for CC. 45LC comes out next, BPS last. Over the next two months, I’m getting my brother a Traditions G3 Pro 45-70 for his Christmas present. It’s gonna be a regular gun buying orgy for a bit.
Shooter
P.S. The leftist POS Guv of Colorado calls the loose nigger “unacceptable” and the sheriff and DA are saying, we had to follow your fucking law.
Gotta love a 5 shot .38 for conceal carry.
Midway’s got a great, short video about bobbing the hqmmer on S&W revolvers if that is at all interesting, and I doubt that the Taurus would be too much different.
Almost forgot- that comes with a free “The Good The Bad And The Ugly” theme song-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9EZGHcu3E8&list=RDJ9EZGHcu3E8&start_radio=1
The left/deepstate/aintreal seem like they’ve kicked up the pace a bit. Good thing sportsball season is started up again. It’ll make sure they’re free to do max damage while everyone else is not paying attention. Again.
Heh. Timing is everything. And as usual, you are a thought criminal for noticing.
I’m glad I never let sportsball distract me from life. I would know just enough about who won the Super Bowl and the World Series to not be shot as a foreign soldier. On rare occasions I’d remember who had the Stanley Cup.
And as the patriarch of my bit of the tribe, I’m making sure my decendants are well armed so they can help protect my old ass in my waning years. Yes, I said the P word. Gotta teach the daughter in law to load mags… Always something to do.
And yes gentlebeings, we are all probably on some brand new lists, not that I give two shits about it. As Mr. Sido keeps saying, look to your preps, buy more ammo, etc.
A storm is coming.
Shooter
A storm indeed.
Would you happen to reside in Southern Indiana?
I’m out in the county near Lake Monroe
I climbed Devil’s Tower back in my younger days. Also climbed Mt Ranier via the Liberty Ridge on the North side. That was a three day climb, and not an easy one.
As for the Grand Canyon, the best times to visit are in the fall, October is best. Or else in the Spring, March through mid-May. I have backpacked it rim to rim, South to North, twice, once in October and once in April. The October hike was the most beautiful. I cannot imagine doing it in the summer, temperatures in the canyon often hit 110 degrees. For those who were not that impressed with the Grand Canyon, the view from the North rim is the most spectacular, it beats the South rim view hands down. Unfortunately, a forest fire this summer burned the gorgeous lodge and much of the forest at the North rim.
Anyway, thank you for the travelogue, Arthur. It reminded me of better times when I was younger.
Spent four days backpacking in GC in the 90’s, late fall. Its quite a sight from down in it. That’s too bad about the fire on the north rim.
We shouldn’t have to live with these beasts…
https://apnews.com/article/phoenix-murder-trial-d0f297b4a87c8a06c673a40f631fca5b
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