The End of the Road

(But not of the adventure!) After Yellowstone, we had our longest drive in front of us. In this case, instead of another national park, the road ended at Nick's parents house after three days of driving and 1840 miles. The total mileage after six weeks on the road seeing the national parks?

Buffalo Xing

During one of our drives around Yellowstone, we stumbled upon the amazing (and rather amusing) scene of a herd of buffalo attempting to cross one of the main park roads through heavy traffic. Or, depending on how you look at it, a bunch of tourists trying to drive through a herd of buffalo...

Mission Accomplished

After searching high and low for the last few weeks, we finally completed our license plate collecting project. We have now seen plates from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. on a single road trip (sorry Puerto Rico, you don't count). The ultimate in road trip accomplishments (right up there with finishing the 96-ounce cherry Slurpee in between stops for gas).

Yellowstone National Park

While Yosemite was the first land set aside in the world as a protected area, Yellowstone was the first to be named a National Park. The park was created in 1872 and consists of 2,221,766 acres of mountains, rivers, and lakes, and is a hotbed of geo-thermal activity. The park is also a gigantic area for wildlife to roam freely and elk, moose, bison and bears are in abundance. In a park so enormous it comes as no surprise that driving is an important way to view the main areas and no matter how hard you try, you will always come away feeling that there is much more to see.

Grand Teton National Park

After leaving Yosemite, we were faced with our first really long drive of the trip. From Tuolumne Meadows to our campsite in Grand Teton was about 700 miles through Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. We weathered the drive in good spirits, with a stop over at a road-side hotel in Salt Lake City. There really isn't much to see in northern Nevada, but the salt flats west of Salt Lake City, Utah are interesting to look at, and the back roads through southwestern Wyoming on the way to Jackson are quite picturesque.

S'mores

For those who don't know (i.e. anyone who grew up outside of the US) s'mores are a campfire tradition and no camping trip is complete without them. Here's how you make them:

Yosemite - Outside the Valley

After exploring the Valley, we headed out to take in some other areas of the park which are less well-known, but quite stunning in their own right - Mariposa Grove and Tuolumne Meadows.

At the southern end of Yosemite National Park lies the Mariposa grove - a concentration of giant Sequoia trees. These trees can live thousands of years and are by some measures the largest living organisms on the planet.

Yosemite Valley

After the bright city lights of San Francisco, we set off on our National Parks adventure again.  Yosemite National Park was the first plot of land in the world to be set aside and protected for the enjoyment of future generations - and boy is there much to be enjoyed!

San Francisco

At the end of the Big Sur drive lies San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Driving in, through “Silicon Valley,” we passed Mountain View, home of Google, Cupertino, home of Apple, and Palo Alto, home of facebook, among others - reminding Jo of that thing in the distant past called “work.” ;) We even spent some time in Palo Alto and walked around the campus of Stanford University (lovely if not a bit sterile/well-manicured).

Big Sur

After our weekend in LA we headed north along the coast to San Francisco. The route is known as "Big Sur." You drive north out of LA on the Pacific Coast Highway ("the PCH") past the well-known cities of Malibu and Santa Barbara. Eventually the road narrows to a two-lane highway and starts to hug the coast where spectacular views are in abundance - so long as it's not summer when the coastal haze hangs over the whole coast....

City of Angels

After two weeks on the road and ten nights in a tent we made it to our mid-point - Los Angeles. This is Nick's former home, so there were plenty of people to see. Also, a four day break from camp fire food awaited us and we intended to make the most of it!

License Plate Collecting

For the last few weeks, Jo has been participating for the first time in one of the oldest American road trip traditions - license plate collecting. In the USA, every one of the fifty states has a different license plate (and most states even have multiple versions). On top of that, Americans love to road trip across the country. That means that seeing a Massachusetts plate in Arizona happens a lot more often than you would think. Nonetheless, seeing all fifty states in one road trip is damn near impossible. Luckily, national park parking lots turn out to be an excellent place to plate spot and so far we've spotted forty-eight states.