Trip Report Summary 

07/28/97 08:00

 

Just like the early pioneers during the westward expansion, we had successes and setbacks and made the best of it.  We accomplished the major objective: my son says he knows why he wanted to go out west now.  And he wants to go back and spend more time at each place we visited.  

 

We did not get to all the targeted locations.  Car trouble cost us a week, but we visited a lot of nice places in the Appalacian Mountains waiting for the repairs.  We put over 700 miles on the rental car that week while we were stuck.  We had to drop the locations in western Colorado because of the lost week of travel. 

 

I kept a hand written log each night in a steno pad, or rather serveral steno pads.  I wrote 90 pages.  I shot nineteen rolls of film, not counting the two unfinished rolls still in cameras when we got home.   When I finished unpacking the trailer and closed it up in a hurry to beat the thunderstorms, I noticed a bulge in the roof of the closed down trailer, indicating that something or someone is caught inside.  I knew where my son and wife were, so no hurry. 

 

We made several visits to historical sites along the Sante Fe Trail, hiked in the Nation's highest Sand Dunes, barely escaped serious consequences several times, said "WOW" hundreds of times, saw lots of wildlife, lots of beautiful, majestic, awsome country,

stood next to a waterfall inside a mountain and at five feet apart, could not hear each other talk.  In Rocky Mountain National Park,

my son kept saying, "What a great park!"  

 

In the next few days I began planning the next trip.

 

                                        --  Bob Kuhns