The Carey Adventures

Photo Of The Day - Your Average Geyser

pwc — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:22:13 PDT

Title: Your Average Geyser

Location: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA

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Whoa, That’s Some Big Sky: Day Two On The Road

pwc — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:39:06 PDT

Day two started out odd for this road tripping, travel blogging crew. We hit traffic in Sandpoint, Idaho of all places. Not much, but then we needed fuel, which, obviously, led to a discussion with a gentleman at the gas station about the health care plan before Congress. Pam has told us she attracts all kinds of strangers to talk with her and this was my and Kelly’s first experience with it.

With that oddity out of the way, and with Pam courageously taking up the driving, we headed out East from Sandpoint on Hwy 200 on the suggestion from Lisa Gerber. Hwy 200 is a great trip around the North and East sides of Pend O’Reille (pronounced Pond Oray I believe) as we wound through pine tress and the swamp lands of the Pack River. Hope was our first destination and a seemingly good way to start the day. But Hope is never what you think it should be, and the one joint in town that open really didn’t seem interested in feeding us. Onward!

Soon after this point, I fell asleep. Kelly and Pam say things were pretty as we left the lake and started following the Clark Fork River. I’ll take their word for it. I did briefly wake up at Noxon (our first town with a palindrome name!) as we hunted for breakfast. Soon after we crossed into the Mountain Time Zone, quickly making breakfast a brunch affair when we found it in Thompson Falls, Montana.

Big cinnamon rolls and a bear greeted us inside the front door of Minnie’s Montana Cafe, a likely spot filled with locals and just a few of us tourists. Well past noon, we were happy to see it was a true cafe, offering breakfast all day, although Morgan, our waitress, warned us everything was big. It’s a common Montana theme; Big. Big Sky, Big Pancakes Pam couldn’t finish, Big Hats, Big Chevy that took us to get beer later in the evening, Big Drunks at the bar where we bought our beer. Everything here is indeed, Big, with a capital B.

Heading East and South out of Thompson Falls the geology changes to stratified hills laid bare on one face and the road goes from constructed to under construction. Slow, slow, slow. South, South, South until the speedway of I90 is again obtained near Butte with its 90′ tall Madonna on a hill. We jack up the speed and fly up one side of the Rockies and down the other. Some place along there was the Continental Divide but we missed the sign.

Let me take a moment to explain one piece of amazing technology on this trip. It’s called the TwitterFone(tm). I’m sure it has another name, maybe even a model number, but for us, it’s a phone that connects us to Twitter. And Twitter has been a valuable resource on this trip; finding us stops, helping us realize that 90′ tall Mary was not, in fact, not a statue of Jesus as I first thought and in general helping make this trip more interactive, fun, connected. The Twitter phone is relegated to the back seat passenger with the shotgun seat reserved for navigation. It’s a tight ship we run. If you’re curious to follow and possibly help out (we need places to stay in Iowa, for instance) follow along with @nerdseyeview, @kag2u and @pwcarey as any one of us might be in the TwitterFone(tm) seat.

Pine! Can you smell that piney smell? Working out way South on Hwy191 towards Big Sky the pine jumped through the ventilation of Snuffulupagus raising spirits as the canyon walls killed reception for the TwitterFone(tm) (which also has Google Maps when we get lost). Our sunroof became invaluable to me for scopping out tanned rocks along the road, dreaming of spending days climbing in this area. The Gallatin River carved our path through the hills until we reached Big Sky, where the confusion started.

Our problem with the finding our accommodations for the night is Big Sky is Big! The Big Sky Resort consists of three separate hotels, a mall, golf course, ski resort and more. It’s Big. With some meandering and asking around, we found our comfy rooms on the third floor. The hotel seems to really be pushing the ‘green’ concept in a good way. Compact fluorescent lights through out, ‘eco’ soap and hair products and signs about it here and there. Settling in, and then grabbing some beer to go at a surly local bar (noting you can still smoke in bars in Montana), we set to the task of organizing the days thoughts, catching up on email, downloading photos and the general task of blogging on the road. While I know the picture makes our life on the road look tremendously glamorous it’s still time consuming and work. Fun work, but still work. Ok, lame attempt asking for pity is done. Back to looking for buffalo!!

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Photo Of The Day - Old Faithful

pwc — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:17:05 PDT

Title: Old Faithful

Location: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA

Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey

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Photo Of The Day - Clark Fork River

pwc — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:48:17 PDT

Title: Lake Clark Fork River

Location: Idaho

Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey

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Photo Of the Day - Bridge Gears

pwc — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:57:07 PDT

Title: Bridge Gears

Location: Lake Pend O’Reille, Idaho, USA

Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey

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Off To Chicago!!

pwc — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:01:29 PDT

I know what you’re thinking. Who is Kelly and why do I want to follow her? Let me explain, no, let me sum up.

Kelly is one of the other road trippers insane enough to get in a minivan with me and head for Chicago. And since it’s 12:45am and I need to get up in 6 hours and be functional, I’m choosing to not edit the graphic. If you follow Kelly, you can follow me. Pam too!

First off, my road trips mates: Kelly helps run the site Travellious along with Austin, who is the tech support/home base/programing/fix it guy staying in Seattle for this trip. Pam has dictatorship for life powers over Nerd’s Eye View, a fine, fine blog where she mentions such things as ukuleles. A word I still can’t spell right without spell check.

We are all packing into a VW Routan kindly lent to us from the fine folks at VW and heading about 2500 miles East to Chicago for the inaugural Travel Blog Exchange, held on July 26th, 2009. Pam is also speaking at BlogHer 2009 the days before, which means we need to arrive on the 23rd. Eight days on the road with kinda strangers, but totally cool people. It should be fun!

We’ve also been fortunate enough to have some help along the way. Boingo is providing us with internet access everywhere they provide it to help keep us connected. REI has lent us some camping gear to test and give honest feedback on. Homeaway.com is helping us out with accommodations in Chicago. And there’s more I’ll mention as we go along.

I’ll have more info as the trip progresses, but for now, check out the TBEX Road Trip Wonder Map, developed by Austin, to help track our real time location (within 10 minutes while moving), pictures, blog posts, tweets and more! I’ll be updating there and here as the trip goes along, as well as on Twitter from @pwcarey. It promises to be a fun time!!

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The Day Before

pwc — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:42:54 PDT

It’s the day before. I’ve already left home, said goodbye to my daughter and parents. But I’m not yet on the road. It’s an odd place as I’m used to saying goodbye and then boom….off to the airport or the freeway or the train station for points beyond. It’s got me all jumpy, excited, packed full of energy that seems to have no outlet. In a bit I’ll try to temper the nervous tapping of my foot with a trip to the climbing gym. But for now I fidget.

It’s not the worse thing in the world, waiting for a road trip to begin. The bags are all packed in the minivan, the list has been checked more than twice and there’s nothing more to fix or do or run down or buy. I can just let the day unfold as planned.

And yet, I’m still jumpy. Why?

I think it’s the anticipation of being on the road again. Here I use the term road literally but half the time it is figurative, a space holder for a flight, train ride or boat either to a destination or through it. It’s movement and that is the base of what I enjoy most about travel. The sheer joy of movement. I’m not sure where that feeling came from…..maybe my Mom never stopped chasing after my two brothers before I was born. Maybe I have a mixed up equilibrium that can only be sated with constant motion. Wherever it came from, it’s there, a love of motion and travel.

It’s not that I can’t sit still. I can and do so every day just staring at a wall, meditating. I know how to sit still. But when a trip is within grasp something in me gets ampped up with the anticipation of movement ahead. Of seeing new sites. Meeting new friends. Exploring. I love input at this simplistic, new level and travel hands that to me in bucket fulls. A fresh, clean slate, soon to be splashed with the color and grime of a 2500 mile road trip followed by thousands of flight miles.

I don’t think getting there is half the adventure as the old adage goes. For me, getting there is so much more. It’s realizing there is constantly here and life doesn’t get better when you get ‘there’. Being happy with being here makes the movement aspect of travel so much more of an exciting aspect of the journey.

And I sit here, now, getting excited for the movement to start tomorrow. Realizing my journey has never ended. A nice reminder and how I hope to keep living life. Everyday is the adventure we wait for, but sometimes fail to see.

And just like that, it’s no longer the day before.

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Photo Of The Day - Keeping No One Out

pwc — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:16:20 PDT

Title: Keeping No One Out

Location: Dug Bar, Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, Oregon, USA

Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey

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Photo Of The Day - Beyond Blue

pwc — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:53:53 PDT

Title: Beyond Blue

Location: Dug Bar, Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, Oregon, USA

Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey

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Photo Of The Day - Evening Hills

pwc — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:42:11 PDT

Title: Evening Hills

Location: Lord Flat, Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, Oregon, USA

Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey

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Van-Tastic Adventures - Film the ultimate Aussie road trip ! [Digg]

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:22:16 PDT

We're looking for seven pairs of travellers, one for each of Australia's stunning states, to become Van-Tastic Adventurers. Film, blog and share your adventures around Australia and you could win $10,000 !