It’s The Road Trip Blog!

(Written on March 3, 2016. One year before the road trip.)

A whirlwind tour of the United States. Three weeks. As many major locations as we can squeeze in. Get there, get the photo, and get moving. If for some bizarre reason you’re interested in this, you can of subscribe (look for the form elsewhere on this page) and you’ll get an email whenever I create a new post. Please feel free to comment on the posts. Just click the post title or “Read Full Post” button and you’ll see the comment area.

This blog looks best on an actual computer. Photos don’t work quite as well on a phone … but we can’t solve all the world’s problems in a day.


What is this all about?

From May 6 to May 27, 2017, Laura, Max and I took a Road Trip across the United States. Here’s what I wrote almost a year before we left:

We’ve been mulling it over for a year, and now it’s set: a whirlwind tour of the United States. Three weeks. As many major locations as we can squeeze in. Get there, get the photo, and get moving. A jam-as-much-as-we-can-into-three-weeks trip. We have much of the route mapped out. We’ll be leaving in early May of 2017, just after Max graduates from Pitt in April.

I know what you’re saying. What’s with all this planning? Where’s the spontaneity? Don’t you just want to just go and see what happens?

What can I say. No.

For us, planning the trip has been so much fun. A few months back I started setting up this blog, which I knew how to do, so that was fun … then we put together a detailed itinerary, which was a blast … and then I did a whole Google map based on the itinerary. I guess in the end we like knowing where we’re going!

Where will we go? Who will we see? Where will we stay? What will we eat? Where will we get the money to do this?

Some of those questions are answered here. The rest? Hey, aren’t you the person that asked, “Don’t you want to just go and see what happens?”

Why am I keeping a blog?

It’s for me really. It’ll be fun in years to come and look back on it as a scrapbook/travel journal. At least that’s the plan. Hopefully the family and some friends will get a kick out of it too.

I had done a road trip once before with my friend Tommy in 1985. Here’s the log we kept then. We spent half the time mocking each other in our logbook, but it was a great part of that 1985 trip.


And so, I kept a blog of our trip.

I did my best to post pictures and a write up daily recap. Every once and a while I’d fall a few days behind … but I’d catch up eventually. Laura helped out with posts written in her own delightful writing style. Max stepped up an wrote a couple posts when I was too bleary-eyed at the end of the night.

So … if you’re interested, click The Complete Blog menu item to take the journey once again, or just click here.

And thank you to everyone—family, friends, colleagues, and strangers—who made this a trip of a lifetime for Laura, Max, and me.

David Beedle
May 30, 2017

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