Final Thoughts from the Road Trip
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
Written from the comfort of my home, please enjoy the last blog post for 8000miles.substack.com!
It’s good to be back. I remain grateful that the trip was peaceful and edifying, and I remain surprised that the worst thing to have happened was a cracked windshield. The map below depicts my location data throughout the seven weeks of travel.
In the style of “By The Numbers”, a late-aughts Sports Illustrated magazine column, below are some statistics from my journey:
9255: Miles driven. Better to under-promise and over-deliver! It’s a bit too late to rename the blog, I fear.
469: Hours spent in the car, between driving and sleeping.
183: Miles of hiking/walking.
27: Nights spent sleeping in the car.
21: States visited.
3: NBA games attended.
2: Times strangers told me that I was not dressed warmly enough for hiking.
2: Parking tickets from the Santa Monica parking authority. I will not be paying them. Should I ever move to California and need to register my car there, I’ll owe $800 once the penalties max out.
1: Shoes lost on a Minnesota highway.
1: Cactus spikes still embedded in my right pointer finger.
1: Police encounters.
0: Speeding tickets. :)
0: Bear sightings. :/
Over the last two months, I’ve continually added to a power rankings of sorts; the time had come to create stratified tiers of my favorite national and state parks. There are some hot takes. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. The best analogy I can offer to affirm to readers that I don’t hate their favorite park is to compare the places I have seen to pizza.
All pizza is good pizza. Some pizza is great pizza! Don’t come at me about how “Papa John’s stinks” or “Domino’s is trash”. I don’t want to hear it. In the same way it’s impossible to mess up dough and cheese and tomato sauce, it’s impossible to mess up enjoying nature. That said, I did employ a number of criteria to help rank which parks I preferred over others!
My methodology for determining which tier a park belongs to is based on the following factors:
Hiking (How many and what variety of trails are available?)
Topography (What kinds of land forms are present? Bonus points were awarded for mountains, bodies of water, hoodoos, and sharp changes in elevation.)
Wildlife (Is a park crawling with animals? Can I pet them? Bonus points were awarded for bison, magpies, prairie dogs, coyotes, and chipmunks.)
Driving Accessibility (During daylight hours, is the whole park reachable by car? Are shuttles necessary to travel to trailheads?)
With that said, here are the tiers, from best (Tier 1) to still excellent (Tier 4)!
Tier 1: Bryce Canyon NP, Yosemite NP, Theodore Roosevelt NP, Arches NP
Tier 2: Grand Teton NP, Zion NP, Dead Horse Point SP, Rocky Mountain NP
Tier 3: Sandy Hollow SP, Lake Tahoe SP, Canyonlands NP
Tier 4: Yellowstone NP, Natural Bridges NM, Coral Pink Sand Dunes SP, Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP
At this juncture, I would like to express my gratitude to a number of individuals and communities. Thank you for your contributions!
Many friends thoughtfully sent music my way, knowing I would consume quite a bit of it on heavy driving days. I am very thankful for recommendations and playlists from (deep breath) John, Dawson, Lenie, Michael, Ana, Anna, Bri, Andrew, Melina, Eleni, Michael, Manny, Nick, Will, Joe, Katerina, Clara, Emily, and Tim.
I will be forever indebted to Brendan Marasco for helping with the assembly of the sleeping platform. I already have a lot of nostalgia for car camping; it was consistently quite cozy!
Most of the camping gear that I used was loaned to me by the Gluntz family. They let me borrow sleeping bags, cooking gear, hiking poles, a hatchet, and most critically, a headlamp.
My friend Evan and my Uncle Bob have both documented unique travel experiences on their own blogs. Those resources were insightful and fun to pore over as I deliberated on what medium I would use to share my own stories.
Last but not least, I was welcomed by very hospitable congregations at the following Orthodox churches:
St. Mary’s - Minneapolis, MN
Holy Virgin "Joy of All Who Sorrow" - San Francisco, CA
"Joy of All Who Sorrow" - Culver City, CA
St. Andrew the Apostle - Delta, CO
St. George - Oklahoma City, OK
Annunciation - Memphis, TN
Holy Trinity - Carmel, IN
St. Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church.
Aside from the occasional letter or email, it has been many years since I’ve written anything substantive. Dad (who has authored many books) and I were reflecting on the act of writing, and we agreed that while the process can be a slog, we are always glad that we have written when it’s all said and done. The last piece’s hidden Bob Dylan references were especially fun for me to weave within my own words (I’ll post the answers in the comments below). As I developed style and tone for this blog, I often found myself channeling some of my favorite writers: Malcolm Gladwell, Hanif Abdurraqib, Sam Walker, Ben Solak, and Bill Bryson. I’m grateful for their examples!
It’s been a fantastic ride. I’ll remember this trip for the rest of my life!
Thank you for following along on my journey! :)
Signing off for the last time,
Nicholas
Bob Dylan References from the "Blowin' in the Wind" post:
1. Blowin' in the Wind
2. Like a Rolling Stone
3. All I Really Want to Do
4. Why Try to Change Me Now
5. When the Ship Comes In
6. Thunder on the Mountain
7. Self Portrait
8. "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
9. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
10. "We came to the pyramids, all embedded in ice"
11. Highway 61 Revisited