5/18/11- Charlotte NC to Fort Worth TX

Finally, after months of preparation, the great American road trip has begun!

After starting with a page of destinations made up of places my girlfriend and I have always wanted to see, and places suggested by friends, family, and complete strangers, we plotted them all onto a map of the United States. Then we played road-trip connect the dots until we could decide on a line through them narrowing down our endless list of destinations to a manageable little track through about 17 states about 7500 miles long, focusing mainly on about 7 states in the southwest and Rockies.

Crossing the Mississippi River in Vicksburg

Kicking off the trip at 5am on May 18^th, we drove from Woodleaf NC where my girlfriend’s parents live, through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and stopping in Dallas, Texas at 1am on the 19th. Our hope was to reach the meat and potatoes of our trip as quickly as possible- giving us more time to spend in whatever we deemed as the coolest places on the trip.

Not surprisingly to those who have done a large amount of driving, but most of the interstate looked the same from Charlotte all the way until we crossed the Mississippi where the terrain began to flatten out. Nearly the entire road could be summed up as a wall of trees on either side of the road, a green median, and the occasional unfortunate flat critter.
Crossing the mighty Mississippi was the first moment when I truly felt like I was leaving my home- the South, and she had pulled out all the stops for the occasion. We were crossing the river near the town of Vicksburg, on I-20 and I found myself in awe that a river so wide could still rage underneath the bridge as if it were a mountain stream tumbling downhill at a breakneck pace. Because of the recent flooding, tree tops on what we could only assume were her banks looked like bushes, telephone poles were barely visible above the water on either bank, and for nearly a mile on the far side, the “elevated” highway looked more like a “floating” highway.

Some of the flooded farmlands west of the Mississippi

From the Mississippi to Dallas, there was little help in the way of exciting landscapes to keep us alert. Loud music, frequent breaks, and snacking sustained us the rest of the way to Dallas. A car is a car and I would stack my Jeep among the best of them, but no human was meant to sit in one comfortably for 19 hours. Thankfully somewhere in the midst of the spaghetti tangled interchanges that make up Dallas and Fort Worth, we found my cousins house where we had a comfortable bed to stretch out on for the night. Needless to say, sleep came easily tonight.