The Journey Begins

For the time being, I am leaving my old blog locked down so all my photos of the mares stay protected. In the meantime, I'll continue cross posting here with new content. I am going to continue with our road trip recap. I want the whole thing available to readers, so here's the first post again.

If you're friends with me on Facebook, you've already seen the "short" (haha) version of this trip. Considering it took me almost a month to do that, I'm not sure how I will ever get caught up here. 

Life since we've returned has been... not great... which makes it hard to get inspired to write. 

Still, this trip was the coolest thing Mike and I have done to date, and it deserves to be recorded for posterity. 

We packed a lot into ten days, so this will definitely be posted as a series. 

Brandywine Falls in Ohio.

The Background
Mike and I have been day dreaming of a big trip west for as long as we've been together. Of course, dreaming and doing are two very different things. 

Now that I'm in my Big Kid Job, we finally have both the money and the PTO to pull off something like this. Maybe it wasn't the most financially responsible decision, but we're not getting any younger, and you only live once.

We always said that when Herbie and Julio passed, we would take some time to travel before getting another dog. As you all know, we made it less than a year before we adopted Bonnie, so that plan went out the window. 

No problem, we're used to traveling with dogs, and Bonnie is a particularly good passenger. 

Some time last year, I decided I really wanted to see South Dakota. It started innocently enough, staring at Google Maps and asking, "How far could we drive in two days?" We'd already explored most of what was within a day's drive from home, and South Dakota felt like the point where the scenery truly changed. The Badlands. Custer. The Black Hills. The more photos I looked at, the more obsessed I became.

Additionally, Mike said it would be "cool to see Mount Rushmore". Noted! 

This year is our ten year wedding anniversary and our 15th dating anniversary. We'll be spending our actual anniversary celebrating Andrew and Amy getting married at last. I wanted to do something epic to celebrate our time together. This seemed perfect. 

Part of my inspiration was watching Hannah and Taylor traverse the country with the horses in tow. They've gotten to do so many cool things and see so many neat places. The wanderlust was real. 

I even toyed with bringing the horses, but soaring fuel prices and Mike's entirely reasonable observation that we'd spend the whole trip riding instead of sightseeing convinced me otherwise.

The year got off to a rough start and none of my plans seemed to be coming through. After feeling very frustrated with life in general and horses specifically, I finally decided to take the "off like a band aid" approach and just plan the trip. 

I glanced at the calendar and decided that the week of Memorial Day would be our best bet at avoiding scheduling conflicts. I did some travel math and decided to book a VRBO for Monday night through Friday morning of our trip. This would give us a home base for the bulk of our trip. The rest? We could fly by the seat of our pants. 

My requirements for a VRBO were that it needed to be centrally located to the things we wanted to see, dog friendly, and remote enough to give us some privacy. It took more research than usual, but I picked a cabin in Lead with a mountain view, and access by dirt road. 

We got our PTO approved and I started Googling everything between here and Mount Rushmore. While tracing potential routes on our map, I decided we should add as many new states as possible to our list along the way. 

Here are the states we hadn't done before that I wanted to hit:

• Wisconsin
• Minnesota
• South Dakota
• Nebraska
• Iowa

We wound up doing that and so much more!

Day 1 (Friday 5/22)
Departure

Mike and I ducked out of work early on Friday, stopping to feed the horses on our way out before hitting the road around 3:30pm. 

We hit one snag immediately. My crazy barn owner was supposed to be away. I was secretly hoping she'd already left because she has an uncanny ability to complicate things. The less she knew about our plans, the less likely she was to throw a wrench into them.

Unfortunately, she was still there.

That would come back to haunt me later.

Our goal for the day was to get as far west as possible. The more driving through states we've already visited we could get out of the way before our trip's official start, the more exploring we could do later on. My hope was to be able to get to Ohio on the first night. 

The first day was not about sightseeing. It was about eating up the miles. 

We made our way to route 80 and started to press west. The traffic was not stellar and the weather didn't look very promising either. The original forecast for the week called for rain every single day and I wanted to cry. Luckily, that did not end up being the case. 

We stopped for a late dinner in Dubois, PA (which the locals pronounce Do Boys). I wanted to hit the Angry Goat Gastropub, but we were on a mission so we grabbed Wendy's instead.

A save the planet bumper sticker on this beast made me chuckle. 

Cruising through the Pennsylvania Wilds.

Progress.

We were back on the road around 8:30pm, and we did make it to Ohio that night. The skies opened up just as we crossed the state line. 

With our goal accomplished, I started to look for a hotel. This is where I learned some very important travel lessons the hard way.

We use Hilton brand hotels for work, which means I am an Honors member. It made sense to search for Hilton hotels along our route to build up points, etc.

I found a Hampton Inn in Niles, Ohio. Since we were getting close and I wanted to make sure they actually had rooms available, I decided to be an adult and call the hotel directly. I went to the hotel's actual website and dialed the non-1-800 number on the front page.

A very nice lady answered the phone and introduced herself by name.  

I went through the whole process of booking a room with a king-sized bed. It wasn't until about ten minutes into the conversation that I realized I wasn't talking to a human, but a very intelligent robot. What finally gave it away was that she couldn't handle double zeros. I caught on when she glitched on my phone number, and again on my credit card. 

Sneaky!

When I got my total, it seemed really steep compared to the nightly rates listed on the hotel website. By this point, we were practically pulling into the hotel parking lot so I figured I'd just finalize the booking and sort it out in person when we arrived.

Turns out the robot doesn't work for the hotel. She works for Priceline, which is a third party booking service. If there's one thing I know from my own job, it's how much third parties suck. I was pretty annoyed to learn that the hotel number on the hotel website doesn't actually connect you to the hotel, especially since the robot never said anything along the lines of, "Thank you for booking with Priceline."

It turns out the third party can charge you whatever fees they want and the hotel can't do anything about it. It also turns out that even though I paid a pet fee through Priceline, the hotel couldn't see that and had to charge me the pet fee again. Ugh!!

I had money to throw at the problem so it wasn't a huge deal, but it could have really sucked for someone to end up in this situation.

The nice thing is they upgraded us to a king suite to make up for the trouble. It was very fancy.

In not great news-- Bonnie chose that night to forget she's housebroken and peed in the bed while we were showering. Whoops! (But hey... that's what our [double] pet fee is for!) 

After one last dog walk, we crawled into bed for our first night away from home. 

Fancy!

We all make mistakes.