Cross Country 2003

One of the cool things about being back in New Hampshire is that I can visit my mother at least once a week instead of the once a month I've been use to for the past three years. We sit and chat, have lunch, and do a lot of cleaning. While on one of these cleaning kicks I came across an old photo album/journal. I was very lucky that my mother encouraged my sister and I to keep journals as soon as we could draw a picture because now I have evidence of all the shenanigans we got into.

Resting by a field in Kansas

This particular journal was of my first cross country trip. I had just dropped out of my second college and my sister was going through some teenage rebellion. I was nineteen, she was seventeen and we jumped into my 1984 SAAB at 6am one random morning and took off in search of adventure. I had this plan that I was moving to New Orleans (see, this wasn't the first time) so we headed in a southerly direction.

We got into loads of misadventures including heat stroke on New Jersey, being chased by a big rig towards Orlando, outrunning a storm in Louisiana, running out of gas on LA49, locusts in Texas, running out of money in Dallas, a sketchy rest stop in Oklahoma, Sara lost the gas cap in New Mexico (She also fell asleep driving and ended up in the desert), our one and only hotel room in Colorado (Mum wired mulla), Car trouble and the 4th of July in Kansas, flooding in Illinois, and hitchhikers in Pennsylvania. The car finally died in Schenectady New York and the folks drove out to tow us home. I left New Hampshire with $300 in my pocket which got us all the way to Texas and included two days at India House in New Orleans. Unthinkable now, that money wouldn't even get me gas, much less food for two.

Sara on the broken SAAB

I have no idea where the actual photos of the trip ended up, but stuffed in the journal was an envelope of negatives which I took to Wal-Mart and had made into a CD. Now I can break them out periodically and reminisce about where it all started.