This winter break, my dad and I flew out to Colorado Springs to visit his parents for a week. After New Year’s, my cousin and I took a road trip from Colorado to California and back. Along the way, I saw many awesome sights and breathtaking views, but I also learned a few valuable lessons about America and about the westward expansion.
Here are some of my revelations.
Wow. The pioneers were crazy.
On the second day of my trip, we traveled from Salt Lake City to San Francisco –a total of 14 hours in the car. It would have been less, but while driving through Reno across the border to California, we were stopped by law enforcement and told to turn around and buy some snow chains for the car’s tires. We were driving a Buick LeSabre 2005, and there was no way we’d make it across the Sierra Nevadas without crashing. After we got the snow chains on, we couldn’t move at more than 30 mph and spent two hours in the snowy and dangerous Donner Pass — named after the infamous Donner Party, which historians say resorted to cannibalism after getting trapped in the wilderness in this area. If we had been stuck there for months, I probably would have eaten a person, too.
Holy moly, things in the West are so far apart.
It took us two full days to get to California and we were in a car. Imagine how long it took people like the Donner party in their horse-drawn wagons — an eternity. And they didn’t have music or movie players to keep them entertained. All they had were stories and hand-played music, and how long could that occupy your thoughts? Beyond that, we could fly these distances in a plane if we chose to. What took me and my cousin two days would take three hours on a plane. The transportation technology that is available to us in this day and age is incredible. To go on this trip again, a total of roughly 3,000 miles, would have taken pioneers years to accomplish. We are truly blessed to be able to travel the way that we do.
Gas is liquid money.
I only started driving about half a year ago, and never regularly paid for gas until this trip. It was a real budget-buster and gas is much cheaper now than it was just a few years ago. It didn’t help that the Buick was a gas guzzler and got about ten gallons less than what the gauge reported.
America is beautiful.
The people, eh… They vary. But the land itself is spectacular. One of the most memorable parts of the trip was our drive down Highway 1 along the coast of California. Big Sur especially made the harrowing drives worthwhile. To look out the window and see what seemed to be the ultimate edge of the earth with miles of ocean on the horizon and no end in sight was an experience I will never forget. The beaches, mountains, valleys, highways, dirt roads, big cities and little towns — these are the reasons that I travel, that I even bother leaving home. They are the parts of America that inspire me to live and not just exist.
