2002 Cross Country Road Trip

For awhile we thought this year’s trip just wasn’t meant to be. In fact, the real trip that we had planned didn’t happen, but had to be canceled because Herb became quite ill. About three weeks prior to our planned departure, he came down with one of his mysterious fevers, which in the past have lasted anywhere from a few days to 4 weeks. Then the fever usually departs just as mysteriously as it had arrived and he is quite healthy again. No doctor has ever been able to diagnose it.

Well, as the day of our departure approached, we kept praying that the fever would pass and we wouldn’t have to cancel. This trip was one we were really looking forward to—it included, among lots of other exciting things, a week on a houseboat on Lake Powell with our traveling companions, the Kalchbrenners. Our departure date came and went, but we still weren’t ready to give up. We kept calculating how quickly we could drive to Lake Powell if Herb’s fever passed. Finally, it just became too late and we had to cancel the whole trip.

After about 2 more weeks of medical testing, with some lymphoma and prostate cancer scares thrown in, the doctors couldn’t find any cause of the fever. In the meantime, it just went away.

“Now what?” we thought. We had blown our chances for Lake Powell, but it was still only late July—plenty of time to get a cross country trip in before the kids had to go back to school. But where should we go? All our reservations had been canceled. We decided that for once we would just get in the RV and drive—Arizona and New Mexico sounded good. No obsessively planned itineraries, no places we had to be on a certain date — just a couple of free spirits hitting the road. This was definitely going to be something different.

Just to keep things exciting, the day before we were going to leave on our new trip, Herb noticed a very large tree in our yard that was cracked and leaning towards our house. A storm of any sort when we were gone would very likely bring this tree right down on our house. I was beginning to think that someone was trying to tell us not to go on this trip. However, being desperate to go, we somehow managed to get someone in the next day to take down the tree. Within an hour of the tree coming down, we hopped in the RV and started driving before anything else could possibly go wrong.

We’re always excited when we pull out of the driveway on the start of one of our adventures, but this time we were ecstatic. This trip was a gift and we intended to make the most of it.

Road Trip Highlights and Lowlights with Video Clips

• Sliding down the surreal dunes of White Sands National Monument on saucers
• Applying the healing dirt of the Santuario de Chimayo as close as publicly acceptable to Herb’s ailing prostate
• Boating and playing in the waters of the nearly deserted Heron Lake State Park
• Mountain biking the 12-mile Monument Valley loop trail to the cheers of passing motorists
• Hiking the Bright Angel Trail of the Grand Canyon to One-and-a-Half-Mile House and back
• Sliding down the algae covered rocks of Oak Creek in Slide Rock State Park
• Leaving a mark on the art world by initialing the half buried Cadillacs of Cadillac Ranch

Besides having a great time and seeing some wonderful places, this was the trip where we accomplished an important RV milestone—when we entered Arkansas, we proudly filled in the last state on our map of the continental U.S. Not bad, in 4 years.