My very first vagabonding trip – which was one of the single greatest journeys of my life (if nothing else because it was my first) – happened 25 years ago, in 1994. My friend Jeff and I spent nearly eight months traveling around North America by van, and the two of us reminisce about the experience this week in episode 79 of Deviate, “Van Life before #VanLife: Rolf unpacks his very first vagabonding journey. ”
This podcast episode is one of many informal accounts of that journey I’ve created in the past quarter century. I tried to write a book about the trip in my mid-20s (one chapter of which eventually become my first byline at Salon.com years later), though I ultimately abandoned that project. Hence, for years after the journey, my only concrete recounting of that eight-month trip were the hand-written journals I kept in spiral notebooks on the road – and a carefully curated 60-page photo album that summarized the trip for curious friends and family.
The physical photo album as bygone technology
Twenty-five years after having completed my journey – in an age when most everyone curates all manner of digital photos online, in near-real time – the very notion of a physical photo album feels deeply anachronistic. My 1994 photo album is the result of painstaking handicraft: The photos are cropped and physically patterned onto the page; each page has printed paper captions detailing dates and events from the trip; the inside cover of the album features a glued-in road map with our exact route traced in black marker.
Making an album with such care and detail was, perhaps, a nerdy thing for a 23-year-old person to do, even in 1994, but my aim was simply to commemorate what felt like a life-changing trip. The chirpy matter-of-factness of the photo captions was a tonal counterpoint to the detailed reportage (and personal revelation, and soulful emotionalism) of my hand-written journal, but while my journal was written for an audience of one, the photo album was meant to be shown to people I knew. I didn’t pretend to be a travel writer back then, and the album is less evocative of road-expertise than simple enthusiasm at having accomplished the journey. For years it was among the first of my possessions I would have endeavored to save in a house fire.
When photos were more expensive, we took fewer of them
Looking at the album now, I’m struck by how the album’s narrative is shaped by which photos I chose to take – and by how these photos were not particularly consistent or comprehensive. In an age when one can take an almost limitless number of digital photos with a pocket smartphone, it’s easy to forget how this used to be a more expensive and complicated process. My friend Jeff didn’t even bring a camera on the trip, and I was conservative with the shots I did take, not wanting to spend money on film and processing that might be better spent on food and fuel. Of the 60 pages in the photo album, 11 of them commemorate a brief Florida visit by our friend Lorin – in part because it was a fun experience (see below for details), but mainly because, unconstrained by a multi-month travel budget, Lorin could take lots of pictures.
Study my photo album, and it’s easy to conclude that the journey revolved around visits from friends and wilderness hikes, when in fact those just happened to be the occasions we instinctively photographed. According to my journal – and my memories – the ocean-sunset along California’s Big Sur coast was one of the most achingly beautiful things I saw that year, yet I can find no evidence that I took a single photo of the vista (which, in retrospect, is kind of cool; somehow, I savored that evening for what it offered, and never thought to capture it on film). We spent five days partying with old Mardi Gras friends during a five-day Philadelphia sojourn, yet we didn’t take a single photo during the revelry (something that would be unconscionable for young people in the smartphone era). We did occasional volunteer work with housing ministries at various points in the journey – but one would never know that from looking at my photo album, since we didn’t think to take photos at those places.
A few notes on the digital version of my 1994 travel album
Though by definition it’s hard to properly appreciate a 1994-era photo album without resting it in your lap and physically turning its self-adhesive plastic-sheeted pages, I’ve reproduced a digital version of my 1994 trip-journal below. In an effort to respect online attention spans, these photos and captions represent less than half of what you’d find in the actual album – though the text, while occasionally edited and blended, is otherwise unchanged from the 1994 version. The month-by-month geographical subheadings are a new detail, meant to evoke the physical sections of the album.
January 1994 (I): The West Coast and the Northridge Earthquake
We officially started our cross-country trek on the morning of January 1, 1994, from the parking lot of the Shiloh Inn in Newberg, Oregon. Our vehicle, lovingly dubbed Taco Grande Con Queso, was a 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon that we had converted for extended road habitation. It featured a CD player, five laundry baskets full of gear (our slim ration for the ensuing months), and a home-made plywood bench that folded out at night to sleep both of us.
Oregon was cold and rainy from the outset, so we headed south in search of warmer, drier weather. We hit California the second day of the trip, and walked amid the giant redwoods at Humboldt State Park. On Jan. 4 we traversed the Napa Valley to central California, where we met up with my sister Kristin and her husband David in Davis. There, we enjoyed three nights of indoor slumber in their trailer.
After our Davis stay, we headed to the Bay Area for some punk rock (Rancid and Avail) at 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley and some coffeehouse slumming in San Francisco. We scored free showers the following morning by sneaking into the college athletic buildings at Stanford University – a hygiene strategy that served us well as the trip went on. From Palo Alto, we headed back out for the ocean. We hit stunning vistas as we drove down California Highway 1 down the Big Sur coast at dawn.
When we arrived in southern California we crashed with some friends we’d met in Oregon: Tina and Anna. Tina’s roommate Melissa even put us up with her family in the posh Brentwood neighborhood of LA. She took us to the Whiskey-a-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip. That night in Brentwood, Jan. 17, I was shaken out of bed at 4:31am by a 6.7 magnitude earthquake centered in Northridge, 10 miles away. When all was done, LA was heavily damaged and 55 people were dead. At sunrise Jeff and I hiked into Beverly Hills to stand in line for food at the Westward Ho! supermarket.
The following day we were able to navigate the broken freeways into the Santa Clarita Valley, where we met up with our college friend Josh in Valencia. Electricity and water were out in his apartment, which made for primitive living the next five nights. Josh’s classes at CalArts had been moved into army tents. We made some forays into Burbank and Hollywood (i.e. NBC’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a failed 420RTD bus to the Leeza Gibbons Show), but we ended up traveling inland to kick around the desert near Palmdale at Vasquez Rocks.
January 1994 (II): Crossing the desert southwest and Texas
Next we headed across the arrow-straight roads of the Mojave desert to Joshua Tree National Monument. There, we hiked the arroyos and desert trails up to Ryan Mountain. Since we hiked in on a winter week-day, we had the place to ourselves.
The desert got more and more barren as we approached Las Vegas on US 95 and California Highway 62. In Vegas we camped in casino parking lots and bathed in casino hot-tubs. We went into the casinos on the Strip wearing ties in the hopes of getting free drinks. We got a few free drinks but I lost over $60 at the hands of the video poker machines – a big loss, given my road budget.
Next we went to the Grand Canyon, where the temperatures at the South Rim were 0 degrees Fahrenheit. We took the Bright Angel Trail to the bottom of the canyon and crossed the steel backpackers bridge after four hours of hiking. Because it was Super Bowl Sunday we had the campground to ourselves. The weather was 20 degrees warmer at the bottom, and we discovered telephones and a cantina at Phantom Ranch. We hiked out the next morning.
With Mardi Gras approaching, Jeff and I elected to make fast time across the Southwest. We hit the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson and White Sands National Monument in New Mexico before hauling across eastern New Mexico and west Texas in one drive.
We briefly caught some Austin nightlife and San Antonio sightseeing before experiencing a citizen/police ride-along through Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood. After a couple of days relaxing at the beach in Galveston, we continued into the Cajun swamplands of Louisiana. Here, we stayed with some family friends in the town of Cameron and enjoyed some Creole cuisine.
February 1994: Mardi Gras, Mississippi, and the Deep South
No American journey is quite complete without experiencing a New Orleans Mardi Gras, and by golly we weren’t about to miss out on it. We rolled into town three days before Fat Tuesday and parked The Taco in an AMCO parking lot outside the New Orleans Greyhound station. This served as our base of operations for the entire festival. Mardi Gras consists of parades, beads, garbage, bared breasts on iron balconies, tons of drunk people, and all sorts of related decadence.
We sampled a bit of everything. In a monumental act of heroism, our friend H-Man took a three-day Greyhound trip in from Portland, Oregon to join us. We proceeded directly from the bus station to the French Quarter to take in the action. We took a one-day side-trip to the beaches of Biloxi, Mississippi to get respite from the crowds, then headed back to New Orleans for Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras. We mingled with the rowdy crowds until Fat Tuesday expired, then saw H-Man off the following morning. The footnote to his heroism, of course, is that he had to take the ‘hound three days back to Oregon.
After a day of historical tourism at Vicksburg, Mississippi Jeff and I drove to Canton (a city just north of Jackson, the state capital), where we spent four days doing volunteer work with Canton Ministries, which emphasizes self-help housing and racial reconciliation – and rural Mississippi needs both. We did work on a house that was going up outside of town, and I did some copywriting for the ministry’s promotional brochure.
Jeff and I slept in a trailer behind the church during our stay in Canton. Our trailer attracted lots of kids from the neighborhood, who tend to associate young white guys with Bible camp counselors. They taught us card games they’d learned over the years.
After making a loop up to Memphis and down through Alabama, we spent five days in Pensacola with our friend’s aunt, Rebecca. She was a great host, and we spent lots of time exercising, relaxing, working in our journals, and enjoying the sun. After Pensacola, we traveled down the Florida panhandle to Panama City Beach for the annual spring break romp there. After Spring Break became tiresome and repetitive, we went inland to stay with Jeff’s relatives in a Leesburg retirement community, and went canoeing on the Gulf Coast with friends of friends near Aripeka.
March 1994 (part 1): A visit from an old friend in Florida
Our friend Lorin flew into Tampa to spend his spring break from the University of Washington with us. Ever since we’d entered Florida, Jeff and I had been harboring plans of going down to Everglades National Park for an extended canoe trip through the swamp. It seemed like a good idea, so we rented a canoe and put our plans into action. Alas, the sun was so brutally hot and the mosquitoes were so maddeningly thick (and Lorin’s 6’6″ 250 lb. bulk so strained our paddling) that we abandoned our foray into Florida Bay after four hours.
Lorin redeemed the canoeing debacle by renting us a motel in Florida City. We celebrated our exhaustion and mosquito bites with Budweiser and Cisco beach wine. Jeff kept things interesting by taking pictures of us sitting around in the motel, not doing anything. The following morning we countered the tropical heat by splashing around in the motel swimming pool for half the day.
After we recovered from our failed canoe mission in the Everglades, Lorin declared that we must redeem ourselves in Key West. We traced US 1 down to the southernmost Florida key that afternoon and checked in at the local youth hostel. A group of girls were staying in room #10 of The Seashell Motel, which adjoined the hostel, and they invited us over for a party on their porch. We walked off to find a store and contribute our share of beverages to the party, and we discovered a great deli on South Street. We walked back to the party, which grew to include Germans, Aussies, and college students from Northwestern, Ohio State, and Rollins College in Orlando. We danced, drank, and told outrageous stories until three the next morning.
We awoke in the hotel after the porch party with the realization that we had already paid for an early morning Gulf of Mexico snorkeling trip. We dragged ourselves down to the docks and chugged our way to sea aboard the Miss Key West. We spent a good portion of the day splashing around under the turquoise water, where everything is colorful and beautiful and looks just like a PBS special.
After snorkeling, we returned to the Key West Youth Hostel, only to discover that it was booked up for the night. We were about to pack up and head to Miami when the girls from Seashell Motel #10 came over wearing sundresses and invited us for another evening on the porch. Reasoning that we had the rest of our lives for things like sleep, we went back to the deli and warmed up for another night, vowing to be strong and not sleep at all. The ensuing hours would be the most-photographed of the entire trip.
March 1994 (part 2): Making new friends in Florida
The part at Seashell motel #10 was much smaller and more intimate the second night. As can sometimes happen on warm tropical nights (and junior high summer camps), we all managed to pair off with girls from the motel. I walked to the beach with my girl, Val, and when we got back at dawn Jeff and Lorin and their girls were still keeping the party going. The six of us moved to the hostel patio and engaged in conversation so sleep-deprived and delirious that the slightest comment became the subject of prolonged, hysterical laughter. I’m pretty sure we irritated the hell out of everyone else at the hostel.
We left for Miami that afternoon, and there we met up with a friend of a friend, Al, a boisterous Cuban-American guy who showed us South Beach, fed us café con leche and Caribbean food, and took us sailing on Biscayne Bay. We were exhausted from Key West when he arrived in Miami, but Al saw to it that we didn’t get to catch up on sleep.
Lorin was supposed to fly home after this, but – after a full dose of farewell rhetoric at the Ft. Lauderdale airport – he suddenly realized that he hadn’t brought his return ticket. We remedied the situation by driving to Orlando and going to Disneyworld. Genuine Americana.
Since Lorin had several days before he could get a one-way ticket home from Orlando, we decided to go and hang out with our Key West girls at their suburban Orlando college. The girls lived a flighty and spontaneous lifestyle that revolved around such pressing activities as climbing out onto the red-tiled roof of their dorm at 4am to talk and smoke cigarettes. Once again, none of us slept much. Lorin flew back to Seattle on the last day of March.
After Orlando, Jeff and I caught up on our sleep with a backpacking trip into the solitary back trails of Ocala National Forest. We followed this with a one-week journey up the southeastern Atlantic coast – bathing in lots of motel swimming pools and eating lots of peanut better sandwiches. After staying with friends and family in South Carolina, we headed back inland for Georgia and the North Carolina mountains.
April 1994: Rafting, climbing, and hiking the mountain South
After several days in the famous college-rock town of Athens and Atlanta we went to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where we met up with my old Colorado friend Tracy. A staffer at a wilderness camp for teens, Tracy took us on a wild whitewater rafting trip down the Nantahala River.
Later we drove into Brevard and I looked up my old Colorado coworker friend Clyde, who now teaches wilderness education at Brevard College. We took us out to Looking Glass Rock (in Pisgah Forest) for a three-pitch climb up the 5.8 nose. Then we rappelled down and went home for supper with his family.
Late April took us through the college towns of North Carolina and Virginia. On our way north into the DC area we stopped for three days of backpacking at Shenandoah National Park. We followed a spur of the Appalachian Trail down the Hughes River, where we did lots of reading and low-key exploring. After several days in DC and Annapolis we spend a couple days touring the old Civil War sites at Harper’s Ferry, Antietam, and Gettysburg.
May 1994: First-time New York City, and a Massachusetts Monastery
In Philadelphia we met up with a friend we’d made at Mardi Gras, and she and her friends ensured we all lived like lyrics from a hair-metal party-anthem for the next five days. No pictures exist of this week, and it’s probably just as well. The photos on this page are from New York City, where, after having parked the van in Jersey City for a few days, we based ourselves at the midtown YMCA and set out to explore the city.
In New York we took a $0.50 trek on the Staten Island Ferry, sat in the studio audience at Donahue and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and stood in line to get cheap tickets to Miss Saigon on Broadway. We spent our evenings sampling the night life in the East Village. And of course we became very familiar with New York’s subway system.
Jeff and I recovered from the urban clutter of NYC with visits to friends in upstate New York and Connecticut. Then, on what was little more than a whim, we went to St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts to spend some time with the Trappist monks there. The guesthouse had long-since been booked, so we were put up in the vocation house along with some men who were considering becoming monks. There, we experienced the unique and intriguing contemplative lifestyle of the Trappists.
We slept and studied inside the vocation house, did simple labor with the monks at the stables, incense room, and grounds, then went to chapel services six times a day: Vigils (at 3:30am!), Lauds, Mass, Terse, None, Vespers, and Compline. The Abbey was like no place on earth, and to sit in the back of the cloister listening to the Gregorian chants at the sundown Compline service was an incredibly beautiful experience!
June 1994: Hiking New England, and a humid trip westward
Introspective from our monastery stay, we drove to Boston and spent two days camped in front of Harvard Law School on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. After a couple of days of exploring the city we drove north to Maine to await our rendezvous with our college friend Steve. First, we went to Acadia National Park.
From there we went to New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, and the impossibly green Green Mountains of Vermont. Our most interesting adventure with Steve happened during our climb of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. In addition to our ascent of the mountain, we managed to meet a great cast of characters in the AMC lean-to at Hermit lake – skiers from Massachusetts who brought 50 lbs. of steak, snowboarders from New Jersey who brought a case of Budweiser and no sleeping bags, and a pair of auto mechanics from Connecticut who brought a boom box, a fifth of tequila, an ounce of weed, and five gallons of beer.
Unfortunately, the leg of our travels between Vermont and Kansas was the least-photographed portion of the trip. Early June was a time so varied and far-reaching that the only thing that really tied things together was the Midwestern summer humidity. It included a visit to the tourist excesses of Niagara Falls, a brief jaunt through Ontario, a two-day stay with an inner-city housing ministry in Detroit, a bizarre episode where we won free tickets to a ZZ Top concert in South Bend, Indiana, and a chance to see the 1994 World Cup soccer parade go through downtown Chicago.
By the time we’d crossed the Mississippi River in Iowa, the weather was so hot and humid that we stuck to indoor stays with relatives all the way into Kansas. In KC we watched the infamous OJ Chase on TV while trying to watch an NBA Finals game. At my grandparents’ farm we helped my uncles bale alfalfa, hung out with my grandpa, and went on a doomed 8-mile run in 105-degree heat.
Mom and Dad welcomed us on our arrival at my childhood home in Wichita. There, Jeff and I completed our road-goal of going for a run (20 minutes or more) every day for 30 days in a row. I also saw some old high school friends.
July 1994: Celebrating (and spelunking) the American West
Once we’d crossed the Great Plains and entered the great American West, we headed for Pike National Forest – my old summer-camp stomping grounds. We loaded our backpacks and hiked through familiar backcountry from my past: Devil’s Kitchen, Ormes Peak, Dead Man’s Point. By far the highlight was watching the Fourth of July fireworks from Dead Man’s – the colored bursts rising from the Air Force Academy were a full 1000 feet below us on the plain, and we could make out the strains of Souza and Louis Armstrong from the parade grounds. A patriotic, spiritual, and utterly euphoric moment.
After seeing Lollapalooza in Denver, we headed north to visit Jeff’s brother Brian in Fort Collins. Our most memorable experience there was taking an 18-mile round-trip trek up to the 14,000-foot summit of Long’s Peak near Estes Park. It took all day, and wore us out as much as anything we’d done on the entire trip!
My old summer-camp friend Todd caught a ride with us as we went back through Denver, and he directed us to a plateau on the western slope of the Rockies that is known for its caves. We hiked into Frying Pan Creek Canyon and explored Fixin’ to Die Cave, Colorado’s second-longest at five miles. After a couple harrowing hours under the earth, we hiked out and drove into Glenwood Springs to relax at its famous sulfuric spa. Since the van couldn’t sleep us all, Todd and I found a comfy horseshoe pit at Two Rivers Park to sleep in.
A youth hostel once again proved to be a great social resource, this time in Utah, as Jeff and I met a group of three girls from Connecticut at the $7-a-night Lazy Lizard hostel in Moab. After a night of chatting, we made plans to hike through Arches National Park with them the following day. Our hike through the Edward Abbeyesque red rock canyons of Devil’s Garden proved so hot that we drove down to the Colorado River for a swim afterward. It’s hard to beat an afternoon of lolling in the cool river currents, surrounded by red desert. After we dried off, we all went into Moab for firewood and beer, then had a great open-air campout under the purple cliffs of Fisher’s Towers.
Jeff and I spent a day in the tidy Mormon city of Salt Lake, but it wasn’t long before we were back in the mountains. In Kamas, a small mountain town in northeastern Utah, we witnessed our first-ever Mormon demolition derby. We backpacked into the Uintah Mountains the following day, then continued our backwoods streak by driving to Wyoming for a trek through the Grand Tetons. We were so inspired by hiking our second day that we skipped our campsite and trekked 14 miles back to the trailhead.
After much planning and many phone calls, we managed to rendezvous with Val (from Key West) and her friend Melissa in West Yellowstone, and we spent the next four nights camping and backpacking in the Yellowstone area, including Red Canyon in the Gallatin National Forest, and Wolf Lake and Cascade Lake in Yellowstone National Park. We visited some of the classic sites, like the prismatic pool and Old Faithful geyser, but we had the most fun swimming in the backcountry and sunning in solitary meadows.
August 1994: A final leg through the rugged Rocky Mountains
In Montana, we embarked on one last extended backpacking trek, this time to Glacier National Park on the Canadian border. There, we thought we might find some peace and solitude to meditate and put our trip into perspective, but we actually met some engaging and endearing people in the backcountry, from a Californian who cooked us fresh-caught lake trout, to a group of Illinoisans who shared cigars and watched the Perseid meteor shower with us. It proved to us that our trip – and America itself – is about people as much as it is about land and open spaces.
After we emerged from the Glacier backwoods, we knew that our time left on the road was short. We made fast time through the Idaho panhandle and the plains of eastern Washington, due for a rendezvous with Jeff’s family in a few days. Perhaps this is where we got our chance for introspection and perspective.
Our trip came to a ceremonial end when we rolled into central Washington and met up with Jeff’s parents, brothers, sister, cousins, aunts, and uncles near Cle Elum. There were ate hearty, swam, went rafting in the Yakima River, drank a few toasts, and told many, many stories. All in all, we had been on the road for 226 days, about seven and a half months.
We had traveled over 20,000 road miles, and I personally spent about $5000, including pre-trip expenses. We hit 37 states, two oceans, three Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico; we crossed the mighty Mississippi River twice, and the crossed the Great Divide eight times. Our westernmost point was Port Orford, Oregon; southernmost was Key West, Florida; easternmost was Bar Harbor, Maine; and the northernmost extent of the trip was the Chief Mountain trailhead in Glacier National Park, Montana.
Note: I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page. To learn more about what this blog is all about, read items #2 and #3 from my update post.
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