Freebirth's Epic American Roadtrip

Back in June my wife and I loaded up our RAV4 and set out for the great American West from our little place in Ohio. We're now in Colorado and winding down our trip. Our goal was simple: see and hike as much as possible in four months. And maybe learn rock climbing. Oh yeah, and do it as cheaply as possible.

I would say we succeeded fabulously. I figured I would start a thread to chronicle some of things we saw and did. We've got a YouTube channel, a blog, all the social media gizmos people frequent. But my presence here has been basically nil in the past few months. It's always good to share with a community you love.

So hang on everybody, this is often a bumpy road.


One the most awesome things I've ever seen. Mount Rainier.

Very cool.

Sounds like a great trip. I look forward to hearing more about it and seeing more pics.

Tell us more!

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More please.

FL shaver said:

Subscribed...

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Plus 1

It's my dream to take the Mrs (Japanese-born) on a cross country trip across America. I can only live vicariously through you now.

Whoa! Glad to see all the interest. Well here's a bit, albeit a disappointing start.

Michigan was the first stop on trip by necessity. But it was also somewhere my wife and I had been wanting to visit for a while. Something about the allure of 'Pure Michigan' made it sort of irresistible. My wife, a Christmas fanatic, was enthralled by Bronner's Christmas Store. We made our way into the heart of the Lower Peninsula. Beautiful dense forest. Well, it would have been had we been able to see. It was pitch black when we rolled into a spot off a forest service road, a sandy and grassy place with nicely spaced trees. We set up our tent and fell asleep to the orchestra of coyotes, birds, and insects.



When we woke up, we saw the beautiful place we were in.



We rode bikes and cooked some breakfast and enjoyed a wonderful trip up to the Upper Peninsula. Then we kissed our good luck goodbye, descending into a mosquito hell that was unbearable. Other than a brief Lake Superior visit at sunset, we saw the rest of Michigan from the car. We found ourselves driving through the night to escape the state.

This is of course an abbreviated account which is expanded upon greatly in the blog. If anyone is interested I can get you the link. I don't know if it's against forum rules to post it here.

Link it. Shouldn't be an issue.

Okay, the link is on there now. It's a three-parter. If any issue comes up, I can take out the link.

This is awesome!

May I ask what the job situation is in that you were able to take so much time off.

This should be good....
Closest I've come is FL to New England to KS and back to FL in my Jeep.

Senshi said:

This is awesome!

May I ask what the job situation is in that you were able to take so much time off.

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My wife is substitute teacher so it didn't cut into a whole lot of her income machine. I myself was a librarian and freelance graphic artist/animator. Basically we made it a priority to save for about two years and then took off. I quit my job but it wasn't so precious that I was afraid to leave it.

Sorry, I guess the link was not allowed. My bad.

Dirk-Lerxst-Pratt said:

Sorry, I guess the link was not allowed. My bad.

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Eh, no problem.

Kentos, I am curious what constitutes duplicate content. It covers some of the same things, but it's definitely not copy and paste. Like I said the the Michigan story is a three-parter and much too long to put in a forum post. Would a link to the video on youtube be out of bounds? A link to the general blog in the first post? I just want to know what I can and can't do with this thread.

Thanks!

Freebirth said:

Eh, no problem.

Kentos, I am curious what constitutes duplicate content. It covers some of the same things, but it's definitely not copy and paste. Like I said the the Michigan story is a three-parter and much too long to put in a forum post. Would a link to the video on youtube be out of bounds? A link to the general blog in the first post? I just want to know what I can and can't do with this thread.

Thanks!

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Duplicate content would be anything already on B&B. For the most part many of our rules were made in response to less scrupulous members attempting to leverage the membership here for purposes of furthering their own devices. Unfortunately those rules have to apply all members equally, so despite your blog being a worthwhike resource, linking to it is not allowed. Linking to YouTube isn't expressly forbidden, however we already have had to deal with people spamming the forums with their YouTube channel in attempt to drum up subscribers and, ostensibly, to monetize their channel. So while linking is ok, linking too many of the same channel may raise the attention of the Mods.

In any event thanks for understanding, and if you have more questions feel fee to PM me.

Wisconsin we kind of just drove through. Nothing against Wisconsin, but it was kind of a pass-through state on the way to Minnesota. Plus, it was fog the whole way through. Whiteout fog.

The fog wasn't any better when we reached Minnesota. The plan was to drive up the Superior coast and see as much of that beautiful sight as possible before cutting inland toward the lake country. Due to the fog, Lake Superior wasn't exactly what I expected. But it was beautiful in its own eerie way. This is what it looked like on Palisade Head.



If you've never been to the Superior coast of Minnesota, I highly suggest you get on that. There are caves, kayaking, waterfalls, rock climbing, hiking, etc etc etc... Even with the fog I could see that it was an amazing place. I'll let some pictures speak for themselves.



Next up, we headed in to the heart of the lake country!

I love a good odyssey. Thanks for sharing.

Love it. Wish I had some pics of my road trip cross country when I was young. Thanks for the links.

Thanks for sharing this. Pretty inspiring and some wonderful pictures.