Cold Day

I took this one in January, 2008 in the part of Connecticut marketing people like to call the "Quiet Corner" in brochures. As we start our road trip west on this dreary December day it seems like the appropriate photo to post. I have two weeks vacation, four weeks left in the year and four more states (or provinces) left to reach my annual goal; I am looking forward to the challenge.

P&W crew works freight on a cold day in Connecticut.

I just spent the last few hours backing up and erasing my Scan Disks. The trip will start with 40 GB of storage, which should be enough. The initial heading is west on Interstate 90 with a side trip into Ontario. Then it will be back into the U.S. and into Ohio. The original plan was to drive out to see friends in St. Louis, but that fell through, so after Ohio it is anyone's guess.

My wife likes history and likes to visit the homes of U.S. Presidents, which makes Ohio a nice destination because there is plenty to choose from. I have been writing a lot about the barge traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers as part of my day job. I went down the Mississippi in August, but I have yet to take a look at the Ohio River. This gives us another destination, which will almost certainly become a reality. It also pushes the mileage way up. It is a good thing that we do well with long-distance traveling.

Some people have asked me how we plot out the itinerary and the real answer is that we don't. We just kind of go. A few friends expressed shock that I would drive into some strange part of the country -- or into a foreign country because this is how we did it in Europe too -- without having made arrangements for the night. I have to say I am doing it the way my father did it. As a kid we would just pile in one of his Chevy station wagons and drive until he decided to stop and that is where we stayed. My parents never called ahead to book a room. In all the times I have been doing this, both as a child and an adult, I have never had to sleep in the car. There is always a room somewhere. Granted, I have stayed in some pretty interesting places. I think the lowest of the low came this last summer in Brinkley, Arkansas when I got a room for $40 and ended up listening to a wife (on one side of the motel) spend the night yelling at her husband (who was on the other side in a room with his girlfriend.)

I had backed myself into a corner in Arkansas and I had passed several much nicer motels in an effort to keep on moving. I ended up moving myself into a very rural area that didn't have much in the way of accommodations, so by the time I got to Brinkley I had to take what I could find. We ran into a similar situation in Italy two years ago. I just kept driving past what would have been perfectly nice places to stay until we ran out of options. The nice thing, though, was we ended up in Termoli in a hotel across the street from one of the best beaches I have ever been too on Italy's west coast. I did have a few minutes of wondering if this would be the first night I slept in a car.

Freight train waiting to start moving in Termoli.

The random encounters on the road are a large part of the appeal of these trips. In Brinkley, for instance, I managed to get a couple shots of some Gulf Fritillary butterflies. An animal I wouldn't have found if I wasn't just randomly walking around a parking lot in a place I never intended to visit. I like these random and chance encounters with people, places and nature that occur. I am sure I could sit down and plan out a more detailed itinerary, but there is no guarantee that what your searching for will be there when you get there. Especially when what you are searching for is the accidental meeting.

Gulf Fritillary in Brinkley, Arkansas. 

So, we will get in the car in a few hours and drive off with a pretty vague sense of destination in a dark part of the year. But it is also a part of the year people like to decorate with lights while they celebrate their lives. I would say, all in all, the chances are pretty good we will come back with something.