So this is it. 25 days, 26 states, just under 10,000 miles (unofficially we did make it past 10,000 with Katie driving Juliane to the airport-which we totally count). We did it! These are also some of our favorite pictures from the trip (and the funniest ones we didn’t post because we tried to keep it classy).
We would like to give a shout out to everyone we saw and stayed with along the way… Katie’s grandmother in Chicago, Molly in Minnesota, the Ahearn family in San Francisco, Sarah at Stanford, Laura in Santa Barbara, the Winting’s in Long Beach, Carlin, Marcio and Hailey in Dallas, Lara and Travis in Georgetown, the Spillings in New Orleans, Mel in Alabama, and Steph, Glenn, Reilley and Eli in Lexington. Thanks so much for being our tour guides of your respective cities! We loved seeing all of you!!
Shout outs also belong to Juliane and Alyssa for flying out to meet us and proving Room 303 can’t be apart for more than a month (this is good and bad).
Also, thanks so much to Nancy’s parents for the hotel points and driving Nancy to and from Katie’s house. And to the Howe’s for sacrificing their car to our travels, sorry for the 10,000 miles we added to the car and the chip in the windshield, the maintenance light that has been on since mile 100, and the faint smell of fast food and farmland.
We had a lot (a lot, a lot) of time while in the car to discuss our thoughts about this trip. So here it goes…
- Every coast is the best coast. Seriously, this rivalry about East coast vs. West coast. Stop. No. If you live on a coast you are lucky. No offense to those in the middle of the country, we really saw some awesome places in the center of America; we however, would choose a coast.
- We may still be unemployed and still very much uncertain about our futures, but at least we have narrowed down that we do not want to be farmers, nor live in the middle of the country. We’re seeing this glass as half full.
- It’s weird to us how much space there is in the country. Coming from New York City, we expected the farms and cornfields and cows (although we were most definitely unprepared for the amount of cows), but we had no idea how much uninhabited space still exists in America.
- WHAT DO PEOPLE IN SMALL TOWNS DO FOR FUN? This remains the great mystery of our trip and we’re not sure if we will really ever answer this question.
- Driving is the best way to see the country. Flying you can go city to city, which gives you the highlights, but you miss the farms, the trucks, the people in small town America, etc. Despite all our terror about the possibility of living in one of these areas, we all agree that these are the places (most definitely combined with those highlights) that make up America.
- Animals everywhere might have provided some of the best entertainment, but we decided that buffalo and mule deer (Nancy) are our new favorites. Go google a mule deer. We dare you not to laugh at its floppy ears.
- Although this trip did not fully deplete our bank accounts, spending our money was completely worth it. Obviously, we were incredibly lucky to stay with lots of people we knew, but paying for gas, hotel rooms, food, and postcards, was completely worth everything we got to see along the way.
- We have been asked a lot about our “favorites”, whether they be a favorite food or story or place. Our main answer is the worst, we’re sorry but: honestly everything. As cheesy as it sounds, we really enjoyed everywhere we went because even the places that at the moment were miserable (special shout out here to our death march in Marble Canyon), turned into hilarious stories and great… or at least memorable experiences.
- We can spend excessive amounts of time together (i.e. an entire year of living together and then 25 days straight in a car). This does not bode well for our social lives outside of each other.
- Doing this trip was exciting and awesome for us, but it’s surreal how many people supported us and encouraged everything that we did. Most of the time we find ourselves highly amusing but we don’t think other people usually do and we are blown away by the amount of people that actually read this blog and followed us around the country (not literally… that we know of). So just, thank you for making us feel cooler than we actually are!