Road Trip 2009 would not have been possible without the support of my parents, and wouldn’t have been the same without the many people I met on the road, and those at home who encouraged me to follow my dreams, and in turn followed along with my adventure.

The biggest thank you belongs, of course, to my mom and dad. I’d barely been out of their house for a couple months when I found myself antsy and wanting to road trip again. They finished the basement ahead of schedule so that I could move back in and have my own apartment of sorts while I saved up travel money. And now that I’m home again, they’re stuck with me for a couple more years while I get out of debt (again), and then put away money for a down payment on a house.  My mom also kept my furball “kids” happy in my absence, my many plants well-watered, and kept track of where I was on the road, just in case. I really couldn’t ask for more generous, supportive, or loving parents.

Speaking of being in debt, I owe a big thank you to my brother and sister. Amber and Collin have each very generously loaned their less financially responsible big sister (me) a large sum of money, which will make a big difference in how much interest I pay while getting my finances in order once more.

And while I’m on the topic of getting out of debt…a big thank you to Reaction Cargo. Rather than replace me, they suffered through four months without me and saved me my job, allowing me to come home and immediately start working on that whole debt issue, without the hassle of job hunting. I’m extremely lucky to have such a flexible and understanding boss and co-workers.

My sister, Amber, and her family, Colin & Tiggy, also get a big thank you for being my home-away-from-home-away-from-home. I posted more web updates from their house in Spokane than I did from Salt Lake City during my two pitstops.

While Spokane is crossing my mind again, a big thank you goes out to my Grandma J, and my Grandma & Grandpa Van Stone, who fed me several hot meals while I was in town. I don’t make it up to Eastern Washington nearly enough, but it’s always good to get to spend some time with my grandparents when I do!

A big thank you to Peggy and Greg in Helena, who also fed me and gave me an actual bed for the night. I’ve met Paul’s mom and her husband several times since our first introduction when I showed up on their doorstep desperately needing a shower during my road trip three years ago, and they’re always a lot of fun to spend time with, with or without Paul.

Another big thank you to “Windpoint” Kathi and her husband Ed, in Green Bay. I met Kathi at two different lighthouses on the same day during my last big road trip, and we hit it off and kept in touch off and on afterwards by email. When she heard that I was coming to town, she took a couple days off from work to show me around Door County. I never would have caught sunrise from the jetty across from the Sturgeon Bay Lighthouse, or visited Thordarson’s boat house had it not been for her. We’d worried a little about spending so much time together when we really didn’t know each other that well, but we had a great time, and now Kathi can say she’s slept in a Walmart parking lot!

While I did get to spend time with various friends and family on the road, I also spent an inordinate amount of time alone. I owe a big thank you to my most favoritest people, who texted, emailed, and even occasionally called (a strange concept, I know) and kept me company from afar. Justin, Paul, James, Jill, Chris P., Chris G., and Laarni…love you guys!

I also met a lot of really wonderful, and often very helpful, people while I was on the road…Paul at the wreck of the Peter Iredale, who had just finished a thirty-five day bicycle ride from Delaware to the Oregon coast…Chris & Nathan, and Jay & Jim, the climbers en route to Camp Muir on Mt. Rainier, who helped me find the easiest route up the snow fields to base camp…all the folks I met along the Grinnell Glacier Trail – Tom & his family, the couple from Petoskey, and the two other families who were also from the Midwest – chatting with them on the way up and back made the twelve-mile round trip hike much more interesting…the father and son I met on the breakwater at Two Harbors in Minnesota, who told me about their adventure on Isle Royale the summer before and advised me to bring lots of socks…everyone from my own Isle Royale adventure, who gave me something more to remember from that part of the trip than just rain – Stacey & Louise, Greg & Cathy, Bill from Iowa, the couple from Virginia, the woman & daughter from Eau Claire, Ranger Pete, Doug & Patrick, Mike & Alice from Sault Sainte Marie and their little boys, Connor & Liam…the folks at Dodd’s Camera in Cleveland, who didn’t charge me anything to diagnose my camera issues…Mary, at the Garfield Heights Post Office in Cleveland, who gave me directions to Cuyahoga National Park, and told me about the historic cemetery that I would have loved to visit, but didn’t quite make it to…the Niagara Falls State Park employee who gave me a ride back to my car in his golf cart so that I could move my car to a better lit and safer parking area…the couple who stopped me in Acadia National Park to say hello because they’d thought (correctly) that I had been parked next to them at a campground in New Hampshire a couple days before…the photographer at the Ocean Grove pier in New Jersey who told me about the abandoned buildings at Fort Hancock…Jim & Lizzie, Alicia, Rafael & Rafi, who greatly added to my Cumberland Island experience…the photographers at Mono Lake with whom I chit-chatted while we waited for the sun to set…the photographer at Shore Acres State Park in Oregon, who told me about Indian Sands, his favorite place on the coast to photograph…Michael & Rachael, whom I met briefly at Salt Point State Park, who left a note and Tootsie Pop stuck under my windshield wiper, wishing me luck on my journey…James at Rodeo Beach in San Francisco, who was good company while we photographed the rather lackluster sunset, and then showed me the easiest way to get back to the highway, as well as told me the best spots to get photos of the Golden Gate Bridge…the photographer at Natural Bridges who shared my obsession with Jim Patterson’s photography…the couple from Gilroy, the Garlic Capital of the World, whom I met while wave-watching near Monterey…the gentleman I met in the parking area at Panther Beach, who insisted on sharing some of his shell collection with me once he learned I was from out of town…Jeff, the actor from New York, who kept me company while we enjoyed a beautiful sunset at Pfeiffer Beach on the Big Sur Coast…and the many park rangers, store clerks, mechanics, hikers, travelers and fellow photographers that I met in passing along the way.

And last, but never least…a big thank you to all of my other friends, family, and blog followers who offered me their support and encouragement, and didn’t think I was too much of a nutcase for wanting to travel around the country sleeping in Walmart parking lots, again.

I distinctly remember writing a final blog three years ago, after my big “once-in-a-lifetime” trip, and feeling very bittersweet that my travels were done and over with…and I think it says a lot that I don’t feel that way this time around. I am so lucky to have been able to embark on another several-month, many-mile adventure and don’t for a moment regret going, but I’m glad to be home, and ready to start another chapter of my life…one that will hopefully involve owning a house, and putting down more roots here in Salt Lake City (who knew?).

Having taken the 2006 trip, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting into this time around. I had benefited greatly from my previous travel experience,  having learned how to better plan such a trip, where to safely park my car for the night for free, and how to make my little home away from home more comfortable and organized. I’d gained a lot of self-confidence, overcome my shyness, and realized that I’m a good photographer. I should have been all set. What I didn’t count on was how homesick I would be. When I set out three years ago, I’d been living in Salt Lake for less than two years, and although I had made some close friends, everything on the road was new and exciting and I just wasn’t feeling the pull of home. Not to mention, I’d already been in a long distance relationship for several months before the trip started and couldn’t see my then love interest no matter how much I wanted to, so I never felt guilty about hitting the road and doing my thing.

Fast forward to Road Trip 2009, and that was a completely different story. After living in Utah for five years now, I have a small but amazing group of people here whom I think the world of, and I missed them dearly. I also started the trip off in a relationship, and although that ended midway through trip, it was hard to be away from him, and harder still to deal with things ending while I was clear across the country in Maine. I’d also specifically planned this trip to have a slower pace, mostly to keep my mileage down (ha!) and that came back to bite me a couple times, as I wound up sitting around twiddling my thumbs or reading every time it rained. Good weather, by which I mean “interesting” weather with good clouds, kept the missing to a minimum some of the time, but every time the gloom and boredom set in (and I encountered that a Lot this time), I found myself wishing I was at whatever Supersofar or Monarch show I was missing, kicking Paul’s butt at a game of Beans, playing drunken Rock Band at Justin’s, hanging out with James and Jill and laughing at their children’s antics, or just eating tuna noodle casserole with my parents.

Homesickness and boring weather aside, I had a great trip. I got to visit a lot of really cool places, some of which I’d passed within a couple miles of in 2006 and never had a clue what I was missing (how on earth did I miss Mono Lake???). Carlsbad Caverns were spectacular, I loved the Old Sheldon Church in South Carolina, and Sequoia National Forest was well worth the detour I made in from the California coast. And speaking of the coast, how can I forget the waves at Cape Arago in Oregon, and those several amazing days I spent hanging out near Monterery and Santa Cruz?  I also survived my solo backpacking excursions. The weather didn’t cooperate much, and body-slamming my camera at Mount Rainier was never high on my list of things I wanted to do, but I did at least prove to my wussy-scared-of-the-dark-self that I’m capable of hauling a 55-pound pack through the backcountry alone. And while my camera issues were a source of stress at various times, I’m still very pleased with my decision to replace my camera while I was on the road. I absolutely love my new Canon 5D Mark II and am so glad that I was able to use it for roughly half of my trip. And although the primary focus of the trip was my photography, I also was able to attend the Big Family Campout in Idaho and got to see most of my extended family, and my extra stops in Spokane let me spend more time with my neice, who’s growing like a weed.

But (isn’t there always one?)…25,344 miles, 19,095 photos, 37 states, 24 Walmart’s and 22 books later, it’s good to be home.

Oh, and if you’re interested, I’ve added one last album to my website and posted my 100 favorite photos from the trip.

Greetings from Salt Lake City, Utah! I’ve been home for almost a week now, but today feels like I could still be on the road. I’ve been sitting at the Toyota dealership for the last five-plus hours, laptop open in front of me, Monarch playing through my headphones. I wasn’t planning on being here quite this long, but I’ve managed to finally finish the post-processing for the last batch of photos and am now writing this second-to-last trip blog. Turns out I have some suspension issue or other (tie rod maybe?) that’s going to cause my 4Runner to fail its safety inspection in March, so I figured I might as well deal with that now while I’m getting everything else taken care of. It was pretty funny, the tech had looked at my service history and wondered where I had driven my car to put 25,000 miles on it since he saw it in July, and the guy at the service desk said the better question is “Where didn’t she drive her car?” Despite the high mileage, though (almost 191,000 miles, 116,000 of which I’m responsible for since buying my car a little over three and a half years ago), I’ve been told my 4Runner is in great shape and that it’s obvious I take care of it. Yay!

But anyways…I’m trying to recall where I left off…Oh yes, the Starbucks/Safeway in Carmel Valley! The gloom had set in by the time I finished posting that last update, and I wound up spending more time reading and catching up on my TV shows than taking pictures for a couple days. Luckily for me, I caught a break and the uncooperative weather decided to play nice for an hour or two when I was at Pfeiffer Beach. It wound up being one of the prettiest sunsets of the entire trip, and I had good company on the beach as well. Jeff, an actor from New York who was working in Los Angeles in a theater production, had made use of his days off by driving up to Big Sur to take some pictures. He was a lot of fun to chit chat with as we got our shots while trying to make sure we didn’t wind up in each other’s shots either.

Unfortunately, that sunset was the last of my interesting weather on the coast, and I decided to detour inland to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks instead before heading down to Los Angeles. I didn’t get to see much of Kings Canyon since most of the park is only accessible by backpacking, and only one section that’s drivable hadn’t already been closed for winter. The drive from Kings Canyon down to the entrance to Sequoia, through the Sequoia National Forest, was absolutely beautiful. There was a layer of fresh snow on all the trees, and initially blue skies with good clouds, and then as I headed into the national park itself, the blue skies turned to clouds and fog. I did a short hike through the Giant Forest, down to the General Sherman Tree, and the scenery was spectacular. The General Sherman Tree was highly impressive as well. Even though the top of the tree has died, and at 275-feet tall, it’s no longer growing upward, the roughly 2,200 year-old tree continues to grow width-wise and is the largest tree in the world. My park brochure mentions that each year the General Sherman grows enough new wood to make a 60-foot tall “regular-size” tree.

I would have hiked more, but it had started to snow and I hadn’t worn the right hat for keeping my ears warm so I wound up heading back to my car. I opted to head back down toward Visalia and then took a winding mountain/forest road through the Sequoia National Forest toward Death Valley. I’m sure that if I’d gone a ways further south and taken one of the highways, my drive would have been much faster, and less stressful, but then I would have missed the view when I came over the top of Sherman Pass. It was dusk by then, and all the needles on the trees along the road looked as though they had been crystallized. It was exceedingly pretty, as well as exceedingly cold.

Death Valley was a major letdown. I had such a great shoot there when I first visited the park on my 2006 trip, despite the summer heat, but I’ve now been back twice during the cooler months and found myself bored to tears. In fact, with a complete lack of clouds, I was already bored and uninspired before the sun had even come up. I drove up to Dante’s View and then dropped by Zabriskie Point, but I know what Death Valley looks like with clouds, and found myself highly disappointed everywhere I stopped. I left not long after that, without ever taking a single picture, and headed toward Lone Pine to scout out Mobius Arch in the Alabama Hills. I’d tried to get the famous shot of Mt. Whitney through the arch at dawn back in January, but I’d arrived at the location too late and there were already several photographers set up in the small area in front of the arch. It was late morning by the time I arrived, so the good light was already long gone and having exhausted my reading supply, I realized I couldn’t fathom sitting there in my car for twenty hours to wait for sunrise.

Had I known that Death Valley was going to be so uninspiring, I could have saved myself many, many hours and miles of driving and headed to Los Angeles straight from Sequoia. And had I known that my Los Angeles locations were going to be so uninteresting with the too blue skies, and that I would opt to scratch the last week of the trip, I could have saved myself even more miles by just having driven home when I so close to the Nevada border, on the eastern side of Death Valley. Unfortunately, my psychic powers are rather lacking…

By Saturday evening I was still planning on going to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, but that didn’t last very long. After I’d given myself a quick tour of the mostly abandoned and often mud-covered remnants of neighborhoods along the Salton Sea Sunday morning, I decided just to drive through Joshua Tree National Park (which turned out to be fairly ugly) and go home from there. I was done. I touched base with my boss and co-workers and let them know I wanted to start back Thursday, let my mom know I was on my way, and less than twelve hours later I was back in Salt Lake.

It’s good to be home.

I figure I’ve got one more blog entry left to write, I need to sum up my thoughts on the trip as a whole, and thank a whole lot of people for a whole lot of different things. But first I think I need a couple more days to finish getting settled back into life in the Real World before I do. Soon…

The last of the new photos have been posted in the Pfeiffer Beach, Sequoia, and California albums.

110 days on the road. 25,344 miles. And not a single ticket (speeding, parking, or otherwise). No breakdowns. No flat tires. No unexpected car repairs. Woohoo! I love my car!!! And no dead deer! (Though I still feel bad about that poor dog in Albuquerque). Yes, I’m home a little early, but I’d become weary of battling my arch nemesis, Blue “Boring” Sky, and knew it was time to just cut things short and come rejoin the Real World. I have ten zillion things to do before I go back to work on Thursday, but as soon as I get a chance I’ll finish up the editing and post another blog. With the uninspiring weather, there isn’t all that much to post process, though I did get in one last amazing sunset at Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur, and my unplanned detour out to Sequoia National Park was spectacular…Not quite the “bang” I’d been hoping to finish things off with, but close enough!

Hello from Carmel Valley, California! Woohoo!!! It’s taken a couple days, but I’ve just finished editing a whole slew of new photos (eighty-nine, to be precise). After being underwhelmed for so long, it’s been very nice to be overwhelmed for a change. It’s been an amazing few days. I’ve had good light, big waves, and great clouds, and occasionally all three at the same time. I’ve taken nearly 3,000 photos in the last week, and had a blast doing so. Seascapes are my favorite subject to photograph, and the constantly changing ocean often means it takes more shots than usual to get the image just the way I want it. It’s probably just as well that I live in land-locked Salt Lake City – I’d have to replace the shutter mechanism in my camera every couple months at this rate!

After leaving the gloom of Point Reyes National Seashore last Wednesday, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that despite the cloudy forecast for San Francisco, the weather was absolutely beautiful. I spent the afternoon following the coastal drive through the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, stopping at various overlooks to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge and Point Bonita Lighthouse before heading to Rodeo Beach for sunset. Unfortunately, despite the good clouds and great potential, the sunset left much to be desired. I did meet a very nice fellow photographer, James, a hair stylist from Sausalito, on the beach and enjoyed chatting with him while we waited to see if we might get any color in the sky (we didn’t). He helped me navigate out of the park, and was also most helpful with suggestions for where to catch the best night shots of the bridge.

After catching sunrise from Battery Spencer, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, Thursday morning I caught the boat out to Alcatraz Island…yes, I actually found Fisherman’s Wharf this time (without any trouble at all, I might add, unlike my 2006 fiasco), and was even lucky enough to have decent weather when I first arrived. I hurried to get all the shots I wanted outdoors before heading to the Cell Block for the 45-minute audio tour. This wound up being a smart move since it had clouded up quite a bit while I wandered through the prison listening to recordings by former prison officials and inmates describing life at Alcatraz and the various escape attempts (one might have been successful, though it’s believed the three convicts drowned while getting off the island). I tried to get some photos from within the prison, but even for having taken the first boat of the day out to the island, there were just too many people around to get decent shots.

The rest of the past week has been spent more or less in the vicinity of Santa Cruz, where I used the New Brighton State Beach campground as a home base of sorts, and even got to shower regularly. I lost count of how many times I stopped at Panther Beach, and the neighboring Hole in the Wall Beach, accessible only through, you guessed it, a hole in the rock, though it was also visible from the cliffs above. I screwed up and didn’t go to Hole in the Wall my first sunset in Santa Cruz, when my tide was lowest, and high tides and big surf seemed intent on thwarting my efforts to get there. I finally threw on the hip waders I borrowed from my mom and waded through yesterday morning since I kept feeling like I would so regret leaving Santa Cruz without having been to Hole in the Wall (I had a great shoot, and had the whole beach to myself!). And as I was leaving, I met a nice gentleman in the parking area near the road who once he learned that I was from out of town, pulled a Rubbermaid tub out of his car and insisted on sharing some of his lovely shell collection with me. I know I’ve said it several times, but I really do meet the nicest people everywhere I go. It’s also worth noting that the only reason I’ve even heard of Panther Beach, or Hole in the Wall Beach, for that matter, is through a Flickr page belonging to Santa Cruz photographer Jim Patterson. I stumbled across his gallery while doing my trip research earlier this year and he’s quickly become one of my favorites. What’s funnier is that I met another photographer, Tom, while shooting sunset at Natural Bridges State Park the other night (when I was Supposed to have been at Hole in the Wall) and we got to chatting, and it turned out that we were both big Jim Patterson fans.

After finding myself bored by a lackluster sunrise at Panther Beach on Saturday, I headed up to the Pigeon Point Lighthouse and was amazed by the size of the waves there. As I was working my way back down towards Santa Cruz, I happened to run into a gentleman on one of the coastal trails at a beach I stopped at, and he commented that he’d never seen waves like this, and that he’d heard on the news that there were supposed to be fifteen to twenty-foot swells down in Monterey. I didn’t need any more encouragement than that, I hopped in the car and headed fifty miles south. I can’t tell you exactly how big the waves were, but they were Big, and they were beautiful. All of the parking pullouts right along the shore in Pacific Grove were closed due to the potential for high surf, but I was able to find parking along the roadside and spent a couple hours wandering along the beaches and rocks, watching the waves crash. I was in heaven. And to top it off, the weather was beautiful, not the wind and storm you’d expect to accompany such big waves. I also found myself chit-chatting with a lovely couple from Gilroy (though I’d suspect from their British-sounding accents that they aren’t originally from the San Jose area), which just added to my perfect day.

After spending hours editing at the Starbucks within Safeway up in Santa Cruz yesterday, I hurried down to the Point Lobos State Reserve, just south of Monterey. At first I thought it was going to be too overcast to be all that pretty, but I wound up having a grand time hiking the short Pinnacle and Sea Lion Cove trails, and was rewarded with a flare of bright pink for my patience after sunset. Sunrise this morning at Asilomar State Beach was just as lovely, though from the windows here at this lastest Safeway Starbucks, it appears that it’s fairly overcast now. This makes me feel quite a bit better about the fact that I’m still sitting here updating my website, and not already down at Garrapata State Park searching out my sunset location.

I’m down to my last two weeks on the road…seems like it just started, and at the same time, Isle Royale and Maine and everything in between feels like a lifetime ago. I’m continuing my way down the coast, spending the next couple days in Big Sur and then I’ll be in the Los Angeles area before I head for the Salton Sea and Grand Canyon. With a little luck, I’ll find some more good weather and finish the trip off with a bang!

Oh, and check this out! My sister was reading through the comments on the page I linked to the other day for the guy who is getting ready to drive around the world, and noticed that someone from Toyota had left their email address and wanted to contact him about his trip. Amber emailed him on my behalf (how cool is that!) and told him about my own trip, and I’ve since been in contact with Todd myself, and may be writing a short article for Toyota Trails. If it works out, the piece would give a run down on my 4Runner adventures, and feature some of my landscape shots that happen to also include my car. Could be some good exposure, we’ll see…

I’ve had to rearrange the California album and add some new sub-albums. New photos can be found in Point Reyes National Seashore (the last couple lighthouse shots), Golden Gate National Recreation Area (includes the Golden Gate Bridge & Alcatraz), Pigeon Point, Pacific Grove (waves, waves, and more waves), Panther/Hole in the Wall Beaches, Point Lobos State Reserve,  Asilomar State Beach, and a couple oddball shots in the much neater California album.