Done.

Results of the beard challenge (remember the bet from my very first post?) - Dev clearly has more follicles than I do, but my scruff is longer.

Ugh, the drive from DC to home. This whole summer I sat in very little traffic and paid only a handful of tolls - they are almost exclusively a mid-atlantic concept, it seems. However I sat in plenty of traffic and paid $12 ($12!) in tolls just to get from DC to Hatfield - welcome back, eh.

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The day before, I drove out of Asheville and north through VA. I stopped off in Lynchburg, VA for one last day on the snowboard I had been lugging along all summer. Liberty University in Lynchburg built the nation's only 'dryslope' - basically plastic carpeting on a hill that gets sprayed with a fine mist to keep it slick and rides kind of like snow - turning and edge control are reduced, but you can still hit park features like jumps and rails well enough. So I tried that out for about an hour (no photos because it really wasn't much to look at) and concluded that while it's better than nothing, it excises the soul from snowboarding/skiing, which is being in a somewhat natural environment and ripping some crazy turns on snow. Continuing north and coming off of pleasant central Virginia roads winding past small farms and on to the beltway, I was funneled back into the rivers of traffic pouring haltingly through the mid-atlantic metropolises. I stayed at Chase's house in Potomac that night, the last of my college friends I visited on this trip. We had a good night swapping stories and catching up, and in the morning I drove home.

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But Jessica almost didn't make it. The car's computer had been a bit glitchy for awhile, with various warning lights popping up and disappearing randomly, and the speedometer occasionally dropping to zero while I was driving (they're overrated, anyway). Also the transmission had been slipping and sticking recently. I don't how related the two are, but when I was at a stop light in my home town 2 MILES FROM MY DRIVEWAY and the end of the trip, the tranny wouldn't catch the gear to drive away from the green light. I shifted around a bit, restarted it, and finally crawled out of the intersection as the gear slowly caught. So I nursed it into the driveway and had a good long laugh. I almost broke down 2 miles from the end of this cross-country trip.

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14 weeks and 14,072 miles. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? I thought I'd do 10,000, tops. Driving on winding state roads will rack up the miles, I guess. But I made it with no accidents, speeding or parking tickets, complete breakdowns, etc. - incredibly fortunate. Jessica made it over numerous mountain passes, two of which went to about 11,000 feet elevation, as well as miles of terrible logging and 'jeep' roads that included the occasional small creek crossing and various other obstructions. I think my roadkill tally was three - I felt really bad about the turtle but hey, what can you do.

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I also gained an appreciation for all the national lands this country has - most of them are out West, of course. It's not hard to understand why early naturalists campaigned for the protection of these beautiful places, but it was a rare bit of brilliance by the politicians who officially set them aside through legislation (probably the only time in my life I'll use those two words in the same sentence). The fact that these places are protected in perpetuity as a birthright for all Americans is an amazing concept. The lands are either free or cheap to see; they are something the government got right and continues to manage reasonably well.

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Okay just a few more cheesy quotes and final thoughts then I'll call this a wrap. The overall cost of the trip wasn't as much as one might think, so if anyone's reading this and thinking they can't afford to do it themselves or I must have spent a ton - that's not really the case. Yeah, I spent a lot on gas because I drove so much and didn't have anyone to split it with, but other than that my expenses were low - I spent time volunteering at places that fed me, and when I wasn't doing that I ate simple cheap food, bummed around on friends' couches, camped, or slept in the back of my car in supermarket parking lots. Not classy, but free. Speaking of friends' couches, I am incredibly grateful and indebted to all my hosts and friendly strangers along the way, without whom this trip would have been lonely and downright boring.

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"Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, In things best known to you finding the best or as good as the best" (Whitman), and

"The infinite freshness, the spendthrift variety of form and species and foliage... make[s] an Eastern landscape a vision of paradise itself." -Twain

Oh, and this one's mine: gas is always cheaper at the station after the one you decide to fill up at. Thanks for reading.

The Smokies & Asheville

View of the Smoky mountains, Pisgah NF. I took a day hike here and it was great - such a variety of plants and terrain, and lots of water.

Another college friend and teammate, Rachel (who I'm sure is thrilled I chose this photo for the blog - sorry Rachel, the other ones didn't turn out). We were gathering some eggs from the chicken coop for breakfast at her family's pet-friendly resort/farmette near Asheville, NC. I also got to pick organic apples and pears from the fruit trees - delicious. It was a beautiful part of the state, with a balance of small farms and mountainous woodland. Rachel also took me to a local ultimate frisbee pickup game, where I realized that my ankle certainly is not healed from that hockey injury over two months ago. This story may yet take a hilarious turn if I see an orthopedist and find out I've hiked all these hundreds of miles on some sort of serious injury.

Misc. South

I took a tour of a restored plantation house near Houma, LA. It was given by a very knowledgeable tour guide who started off with lots of history about French and Spanish colonialism in the region. Different rooms of the house had been converted into mini-museums displaying local culture. One contained elaborate Mardi Gras costumes, and another was a recreation of former LA senator Allen Ellender's Washington office (below), with all his actual stuff. He had signed photographs of countless heads of state and other US leaders, as well as cabinets containing travel souvenirs and gifts from around the world. The strangest of these were a human scalp and a shrunken head. I didn't take a picture of them because I found it too strange.

Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's estate in Oxford, Mississippi. A literary hero of mine, and a sight worth seeing - I like him even more now because his house wasn't oversized and his property contained woods with a few trails.

I had no idea armadillos lived in the US, much less MS. I was so confused when I saw the first one. They are weird-looking and seem pretty stupid.

New Orleans

I made it into New Orleans on a friday evening excited to see the historic French quarter and get a feel for how the city has bounced back after Katrina (conclusion: mixed results. more on that later). I parked in a less crowded area of downtown and tried to navigate to the Mississippi/French quarter and ended up walking a half hour the wrong way before figuring it out. So after about 90 min. I made it to that area - live music filling the streets, bars and restaurants everywhere, and general revelry. I walked around more, got a drink and listened to some live jazz, and ate some overpriced street food. I didn't know where the night was going to take me - I had been trying to reach my college friend David Sugg who has a teaching job in New Orleans, but he had been busy with work and I'd been out of cell service in the bayou, so we hadn't yet connected. I would usually just hit the highway and pull off and sleep in the car at a trucker stop somewhere, but it was just too stinking hot and humid to do that, but motels aren't really in my budget. So as the night was getting long, I was walking back to my car and wondering where to go, and lo and behold Sugg calls. So it was easy going from there - we met up, got my car parked by his apartment, and then it was round two out on the town. We walked allll the way across a portion of the downtown (a couple of hours walking), checking out different nightlife neighborhoods. We found our way back to Sugg's apartment via trolley car at dawn. I'm not sure what exactly I was thinking - I was up for about 24 hrs. straight. But hey, I certainly got a feel for downtown New Orleans.

Sugg's place, and below, part of the lower 9th ward - Sugg took me on a driving tour of both the recovered and not-so-recovered areas of the city. Five years later, lots of condemned houses still stand waiting to be torn down, next to houses that have been rebuilt (or people simply painted over the Katrina "X" on the front implying that it was condemned) and re-inhabited. It was hard to imagine that the streets we were driving down had once been under 12+ ft. of water. Also, the day before when I had first walked to the French quarter, I just happened to walk by the fenced-off, abandoned Charity Hospital. I didn't connect at the time this particular building to the infamous news reports following Katrina, but I had a feeling, which Sugg later confirmed. A sad chapter in our country's history. Speaking of Sugg, he is a teacher at a high school in New Orleans. When he was grading a stack of his students' essays while I was visiting, he showed me one that was immediately burned into my memory. It was written by a ninth grader with terrible grammar and little command of punctuation (if I didn't know beforehand I might have guessed it was by an elementary-schooler) who explained why he loved football (main reason: it kept him off the streets). Maybe I was just projecting onto the essay what I expected to see, but I thought that the half-page of partially legible writing said volumes about the world he's growing up in.

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So, maybe this chapter on my time in New Orleans comes across as a little hypocritical or immature - presuming that I got a taste for the difficulties that city has and continues to face, while spending part of my time out on the town. But I instead think that we celebrated some of the culture that makes New Orleans great, giving local businesses some tourism dollars in the process, and I now find myself rooting for the people making it happen there rather than just feeling sorry for them.

Down on the Bayou

I left Houston and drove down along the wetlands of Louisiana, close to the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. It was stinking hot, with thick humid air and lots of bugs. I took a short hike in a wetland wildlife refuge (you need a boat to really see much of these places, as there's almost as much land covered with water as not when you start getting way down near the gulf). I saw the first good long downpour since June, which made me happy. However, despite the rain, the ferocious bugs were still biting me! I saw a wild boar, crickets the size of mice, and live oaks draped in Spanish moss. Lots of nice Southern sights - no gators, though.

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On a side note, it's about time to get home - while all the freedom is great, since the MDS project in N.O. I was trying to do didn't work out, I haven't done a service project in a month now, and I don't really like having no purpose for too long. I'd like to be productive again instead of freeloading off friends and spending my savings.

I spent a night camping on a boat dock in the bayou. I didn't really sleep much - it was too hot and humid. Throughout the night, small-time commercial shrimpers and fishermen launched their boats. It was great to see that they are able to run their businesses and put seafood on our plates as the gulf oil spill (theoretically) subsides. I heard a man speaking in a thick Creole accent which blew my mind with its rich deep blend of French and Southern tones.

Home (but not done)

So I made it home today, Aug. 27th, about 14 weeks after I left. I had wanted to keep the trip going another week or so, but the real world simply would not wait any longer, in the form of an immunization follow-up that I needed to get for Drexel's clinical rotations and was already long past due. But I still have lots of stuff I'm going to add to this blog within the next few days - pictures from down on the bayou and up in the Smokies, some stories, and thoughts on the whole thing. And I think I'm going to get away one last time to central PA for a building project and to visit Dickinson friends, which would have been the last leg of the trip if I didn't need to get this shot earlier today. Feels like fall...

Texas

So I finally got around to adding stories and captions to all the pictures I put up a few days ago. I'm just wrapping up a few days here in Houston with my friend Jay. Good times have been had going to a Mets-Astros game (with free tickets from Jay's job- woohoo), sampling some tasty local brews, figuring out weird Texas road systems, and enjoying his apartment's A/C (its wicked hot and humid outside all the time). Houston is a huge city that appears to be growing rapidly and has a crazy network of highway overpasses. Also, as I finished my drive across Texas, coming from San Antonio out to Houston, I could tell that I'd entered the South and more specifically the gulf coast area - the flat landscape, the short trees, the broad town streets the humidity the place. Well, next is New Orleans and then that final drive northeast to home, with one more stint of camping in the Smokies.

Carlsbad Caverns NP

I stopped by Carlsbad Caverns Park in southeast New Mexico. It was every bit as amazing as my friend Mike had suggested - the part that I got to see was one huge open cave room with various chambers. An elevator dropped you down over 600 feet underground from the visitor's center building in frighteningly little time.

Water reflecting the mineral formations and surrounding rocks.

Crossing the Southwest

So what has been (and I sure hope will remain) the longest single day drive of this trip was my trek from San Diego to Albuquerque via Tucson. As I wound down my time in San Diego, I knew Mark had an early plane flight on that upcoming Thursday morning, and I figured I would just leave his apartment at the same time he did, giving me a sufficiently early start for what would be a long drive. For whatever reason it was a kinda strange night and I got to sleep around 1am, got up at 4, we said our goodbyes, and I was driving by 5. I then drove east, hard, bidding a sad goodbye to the west coast and starting to think about the end of this journey. Driving east into the desert dawn, I squinted in the sunrise ahead and watched the colors grow.

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I then made it into Tucson around midday. Jessica had a date with the local Volvo dealership. As I may have hinted earlier, my car had been worrying me more and more. It's had a oil leak problem for awhile which had been getting worse, and arriving San Diego a steady engine rattle had cropped up - a sign that my worst fears were coming true and the piston rings were badly wearing down? I took it to a local mechanic who had come recommended, and he quickly gave me a doomsday evaluation. Nothing he could do for it other than rebuild the engine, he said, and told me that the best thing to keep it going in its current state was to cut open a tube to vent pressure from the crankcase, constantly monitor the oil level, and hope for enough life in the motor to get me back to Philadelphia. Great. I did as he recommended, but in the days after this, while I was still just puttering around San Diego, my brain kept working over the problem, and on my drive to Tucson, no oil was coming out of the opened tube, but it was still pouring out of the oil cap, where the leak has been all along. Was it possible, after all this, that the issue was simply the car needed a new oil cap - the easiest, cheapest, most obvious solution (which several of my friends had suggested before, and which I had scoffed at - who ever heard of changing a car's oil cap as a part of routine maintenance? Not me, my father, or the mechanics I'd spoken to along the way). When I got the car looked at by the Volvo-only mechanics, they confirmed this. After all that fretting, all I needed was a $10 part. An oil change and a tuneup was a good idea too. The rattling of the engine was caused by a breakdown of rubber bushings caused by (go figure) the oil leaking all over the engine bay. I'm sure my car and situation was the laughingstock of the mechanic crew for the day, if not the week. I know that this was a long explanation, but it's hard to confer what a ridiculous 'head-fake' this whole situation had been. The car is my home and transportation and has been for months now, and to go from thinking that it may die on me in the middle of the southwestern desert to realizing that it just needed the easiest fix possible was alot to handle... in a good way. Anyway, the Volvo dealership lounge provided me with a good nap site, I stuffed my pockets with the snacks and fruit provided, paid my very small bill, and was on my way with lifted spirits.

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My time in Arizona lasted a whopping ten hours, but I still got a feel for the immigration war that is taking place there - in person with the checkpoints on the interstate, on talk radio as I flipped through stations, and in the local newspaper headlines when I stopped in gas stations. While driving along interstate 8, which sweeps across the southern portion of the state, I drove through two border patrol checkpoints, where all traffic has to stop and be questioned by one agent while another walks a dog around your car that sniffs for drugs or hidden passengers. At one stop I was pulled aside and patted down and the dog was made to run a thorough sweep of my car - who knows why. It felt vaguely un-American, but I suppose law enforcement has to do some desperate things about the drugs and illegal immigrants rushing in from Mexico.

My drive continued to Albuquerque, where my friend/relative Eric Stillions lives. I didn't quite realize just how far I had to go to get there from Tucson - everything is bigger out West. As I drove into the evening, thunderstorms rolled overhead. Since I was in the desert, the line of sight was largely uninterrupted and I could constantly see lightning touching down in every direction. One particular thundercloud off in the distance straight in front of my car was amazing - it was toplit by the setting sun and filled with spikes of lightning like flashbulbs going off inside a circus tent. I drove into the night and arrived at his house at 2am - all in all, an ~850 mi., 22-hr. day, with an hour nap at the Volvo dealership. The following day was spent recovering from that terrible idea, seeing some of downtown Albuquerque, driving up to a great view of the city from a mountaintop, and hanging out at Eric's house.

"The game is rigged." Eric works in the film/TV industry, and snagged a few tokens from his time on the set of "The Wire", a very good show which I ironically had just been watching with Mark and Rebecca in San Diego. He decided to hang the pay phone prop on the wall of his living room, and we threw in the interrogation room switchbox for good measure.

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I continued on east from Albuquerque, driving down through Roswell, which contained a disappointing lack of aliens (or dumb alien-related tourist traps), to Carlsbad Caverns and then into west Texas. Whew, now there's an empty place. At least the landscape is green and somewhat pleasing to the eye, because you're looking at it for a looooong time. West Texas is where I honed my driving-with-my knees technique as a way to pass the time - when the road is perfectly straight, flat, and empty for hours, why not just cradle the base of the wheel with your knees and leave your hands free to... well, twiddle your thumbs? I don't know, it was something to do. I once went 30 minutes without laying a finger on the wheel while driving 70, I kid you not. It was actually pretty easy. Anyway, I had seen an old-timey mining ghost town in Death Valley, which was still around basically as a tourist attraction, but in west Texas I drove through modern-day ghost towns - houses, stores, gas stations, etc. that were all fairly recent and had been built around highway junctions only to be deserted sometime within the last few decades, the buildings left completely intact. It was a little sad. On my second day driving across the state, I made it to San Antonio and saw the Alamo. It was interesting to learn about Texas' path to statehood-certainly different from any other state. The Alamo church, seen below, was beautiful inside but photography was banned.

Tijuana

Driving into Mexico looks a whole lot easier than driving out. I avoided the issue by walking. I took a trolley down to the border and walked through some gates into Tijuana - there is absolutely no security checkpoint whatsoever for walking into Mexico - crazy. It was a grimy, smelly, noisy place where I was constantly hounded by peddlers selling anything and everything. It was annoying but overall worth seeing. I had a yummy, cheap lunch and walked around a lot. I noticed that there's a ton of pharmacies right at the border crossing, and apparently the mullet is still a popular haircut for guys in Mexico. Walking back into the US did require a security check similar to airport customs. And now I can say that my roadtrip included 3 countries.

San Diego

San Diego coastline.

Myself and Mark on the beach, below. Hanging out with Mark and his girlfriend Rebecca in San Diego was so relaxing. The temps there were perfect, the local fare was delicious, and the beaches were lovely. I caught up on sleep, read all the way through Mark's copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road", and caught up on sleep. Mark and I had an interesting experience playing two wanna-be pool hustlers at a bar one evening - they were good at pool but not very good at hustling. Their act was pretty obvious and they didn't get a dime from us.

Goodbye, West Coast

So a quick update here - I've spent the past 6 days hanging out at my friend Mark's apt. in San Diego. Seeing the beach, eating great food, relaxing, starting to study for grad school (yikes), walking to Tijuana - pictures and such to follow soon. Tomorrow mrng. I'm hitting the road again and planning to make it all the way to Albuquerque.

Death Valley and Surrounds

So after I was done at White mountain, I drove to Death Valley NP. It was incredibly hot at the low elevations, but the huge park also includes mountain ranges where the exposure is still intense but the temps stay much more moderate. I camped in such an area and it was really nice - just slept under the stars in my lightweight sleeping bag. The stars in this area were the best I've seen on the trip.

It was stinking hot in Death Valley in august... huh, who would have thought. I did some off-roading in the flat areas of the desert. Jessica held up as best as she could. After Death Valley I drove down to my friend Mark's place in San Diego, where I'm posted up for several days. Going to do some work on the car to shore it up for the long drive back east. And seriously, the poor thing has taken a beating this summer - huge mountain passes, 9500 miles so far...

Anyway, Mark is a former college roommate and good friend of mine who has a job here and a nice apartment. His girlfriend who I also know from school is currently visiting too, so I'm doing a great job as third wheel as we go out and see some of the town, hang out on the beach, and just bum around the apartment - it's nice to be clean and comfortable again. As I drove down from Death Valley to San Diego, I sat in LA traffic while listening to old-timey Mexican music on the radio and felt very SoCal. I also saw the remnants of the Manzanar Japanese internment camp - it was just a brief drive-through unfortunately but still a powerful experience. Although I hopefully have almost another month to go on the trip, I'm feeling like my time hiking White mtn. and dabbling in Death Valley was (hopefully) the last big adventure of this trip. I had an evening driving into Death Valley that didn't work out exactly as planned, and with Jessica hurting somewhat, temps still over 100 in the valleys at night, and my information to navigate to the campsite very limited, I thought, this is getting a little old. Everything worked out fine, but I'm still pretty ok with having no more evenings like that one, and having a few more people to visit along the way back east instead of more camping excursions.

Mining ghost town building.

Welcome to Mars (Eastern Sierra)

Above, the 14, 250' peak of White Mountain as I hiked towards it. Seriously, the region on the east side of the Sierra Nevada range was the strangest, and maybe most inhospitable place I've ever seen. Some of the tallest mountains in the continental US, with desert valleys in between. Everything was really dry and the sun was intense. Climbing a 14,000' peak was one of my silly macho goals for the summer, and I got good advice from people along the way that White mountain in midsummer would be a non-technical, uncrowded peak. I didn't have to feel the effects of the altitude too much, because I had been high up in Yosemite for several days, and the night before the climb I camped at the trailhead at 11,000' feet. There was still some snow near the peak, and the views in every direction were incredible - looking at the spine of the Sierras, with huge glaciers and other 14ers to the west, and Death Valley and Nevada deserts to the east. The drive up to the trailhead went past groves of Bristlecone pines, the oldest known trees. They are these half-dead stunted little things that grow high up on the dry exposed mountain slopes where almost nothing else can.

View to the south of White Mountain, with the access road in the distance.

Bristlecone pines - as the climate changes over the millenia they die back on certain slopes, and the wood practically never decays. The big, almost dead ones in the picture above might be 4,000 yrs. old. Hard to imagine.

Sierra Nevada Range Animals

Marmot - the groundhog of the West

More Blacktailed deer

Some type of small owl

Jackrabbits are the strangest looking animals. And I live outside and have some scruffy facial hair, so I guess I fit this category well enough. Proper sun protection is important in the desert.

Climbing Half Dome

Climbing Half Dome was a trip. As far as numbers go, it’s the toughest day hike I’ve done this summer – about 22 miles total, and 4800’ vertical rise. From what people have told me so far this summer, it seemed like a must-do – you hike up past several waterfalls, then on to the dome itself, with the final ascent climbing simply an enormous granite slab that overlooks the park in every direction for miles. However, this also makes it terribly popular with the other hordes of people visiting the park in the summer. But I thought to myself, no problem, I’ll hike it on a weekday, and get up really early to beat whatever crowd there still is. I thought myself mighty clever eating breakfast by the light of the moon and getting into the parking lot of the park at dawn. However, it was a long drive to said lot, and by the time I packed up and walked a few miles to the trailhead, it was already 7:15, and way too late to beat the crowds that had been camping much closer. But I hike pretty quick, and I passed a few hundred people going up (I’m not exaggerating), but it was still a conga line when I got to the cables (photo above). Waiting in the cables line wasn’t as bad as waiting at the DMV, but it was tedious. You take a few steps… you wait for some people who aren’t fit enough for it to struggle on… you take a few steps… you wait for some people to freak out, give up and turn around… and at last you make it to the top, with 100 or so of your closest friends. Ok, so at this point I’m painting a pretty bleak picture, but that isn’t fair. It was a great time and one of the most amazing day hikes I’ve ever done. The waterfalls on the way up and views from the top were insane – standing on the over-vertical edge of the 2,000’? cliff was such a rush. But the crowds were challenging – who likes waiting in line when you’re hiking? Also, so many of the hikers up there were comically unprepared – I saw people with one small water bottle (this is 9-11 hrs of hard summer hiking here), children who couldn’t have been older than seven being dragged along by their parents, and my favorite – flip flops.

I thought that there was going to be a starbucks at the top…

My favorite view of the Yosemite valley area. And below, a mountain lake on a different day hike. Also, an unrelated story I'll throw in here - my camp in the neighboring NF was usually quiet, and I barely saw another person back in there during my 4 nights at that spot. However, sound did travel well through the valley that I was on one side of, and I heard dogs, trucks, etc. in the distance. But the one night, I heard the sounds of some sort of strange rally off in the distance – strains of pop music, short speeches, and escalating group chants could be heard (but none of what they were actually saying). Who knows.