The End!
I still felt like I was calling my friends and trying to convince them to go on a cross-country ride but the fact was that I already did it and was on the last leg of that four thousand mile, eight day blast. Seven days went by with every single moment being relished in one way or the other. Now, here we were in Idaho, cruising at 90 mph with vast expanses of open land on both sides and the golden tinted sky above us. "Let me get the last sunset of our journey". I said to my friend who was driving. He pulled over and I captured the moment forever. This, I can share with everyone but not the millions of other moments I froze in the hard drive of my brain. 12 more hours of driving and it would be the end! Life would return from the state of natural bliss to the state of materialistic dependency. Cell phones, e-mails, TVs and what not. Worry about deadlines, competing with colleagues and impressing the boss. Life would run by the clock and dictated by the gadgets.
Though Portland is almost due West (a little North) of Yellowstone, there is no direct route in that direction. One has to either drive up into Montana, go through Washington and then come down, or go down in Idaho and again back up into Oregon. This would increase the drive time considerably but there is no other option. We entered Oregon sometime after midnight. Not sure how the night passed but the last Sunrise of the trip was caught right on time. The drive was awesome on the banks of the Columbia River and then the Hood River. Mt. Hood in Washington was playing hide-and-seek and we could see the landscape slowly change from uninhabited thousands of acres of land to sparsely populated pieces to townships to a fairly congested city. It was an uneventful journey except for the time when I was half asleep while driving as we lost the Red Bulls we were carrying. We reached the car rental by 9:00, Returned the SUV and my friend rented a regular sedan for the rest of the week till his car would arrive. We picked up the keys to their new apartment and checked in. It was a very pretty, quite big two bedroom, two bath apartment for a lot less cost than a very basic one bedroom apartment over here. We were tired but completely satisfied. It was a successful trip and a happy ending. Ooops... not yet an end for me. I had to catch the flight back to JFK the same night. We had our lunch and started to transfer pictures from their camera onto my USB flash drive and from my camera into their laptop. It took more than an hour to transfer the 5 Gb worth, 2000 odd pictures, from my camera to their laptop. Now I had the duty to filter them and post them on my website once I returned to NY. I knew I would be busy for at least half a dozen weekends after going back home. My friend and his wife gave me a ride to the airport that night and I was in New York once again the next morning. Luckily it was a non-stop flight and I slept almost every minute I was in the air. We took a full week to to go there and I was back in five hours.
 Labels: 4000 mile drive, adventure, badlands, chicago, colorado, cross country, grand teton, mt rushmore, New York, ny to portland, oregon, road trip, south dakota, windcaves, wyoming, yellowstone |
