January 5th thru the 13th marks the 10 year anniversary of when I drove across country my first time. I was spending a semester out in Los Angeles and along with 11 of my friends we decided to take a week and drive across the south western part of the U.S. Later the next spring we would drive home the northern route.
We drove caravan style with the 12 of us broken up into pairs of two. The only way to communicate car to car was to write something like REST STOP on a piece of paper and then pass each car to communicate the message. This was 1997, we were college students, and none of us had a cell phone.
We met some of the group at a hotel in Pennsylvania and then met the rest of the group in Tennessee. This is where our journey began and also the first place I ever had a Krispy Kreme donut. The town was Jackson and it actually shared by both Virginia and Tennessee.
From there we got to see some really cool sights. Graceland, Sun Studios, The Memphis Belle, Mississippi River, Cadillac Ranch, Red Rocks, Grand Canyon, Hover Dam, Las Vegas, and finally Los Angeles.
While in Arkansas I experienced my first ever dry county. Basically a county where alcohol sale is prohibited 24/7. When we asked a girl behind a gas station counter what she does for fun when there is no alcohol she said, "we have dances."
The day after that we landed in Shamrock Texas and our second dry county. When we asked where the we could get beer the response from the person behind the counter.....Oklahoma. So we sent two of our friends on a drive, in a snow storm, to get 40s of the beast. Hey, we were in college and very poor. Shamrock was just a few miles into Texas.
The trip was great fun and so many good stories came out of it. My friend Brian has posted the journal from 10 years ago on his blog. If anyone cares to read it go to:
http://livefromrodneydrive.blogspot.com/index.html
He has posted pictures and everything. It is a really interesting read of 12 college students (7 guys and 5 girls) and how a 20 year old thinks. Like the fact that a tour of a Petrified Forest/Painted Desert that cost $5 was too much for us.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Nice. Calhoun on blogger. Welcome.
10 years man. 10.
So glad we can all blog and laugh about it still to this day. Thanks for adding all the details to the comments - I'm really curious what the girls think of all this.
Post a Comment