Hello world. We, Pim and Paul, have been on a few roadtrips ever since we’ve had a car available to us. These trips have brought us East (Wroclaw, Poland), North (Uppsala, Sweden) and South (Rome, Italy) but we never ventured West. This, of course, mostly derived from the fact that living in The Netherlands means ‘west’ is water. We kept making half-baked plans to go west but these never came to fruition.
So, in September 2009, over a very nice dinner in Almere, we were discussing ‘The West’ again. This is when we decided to go on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles somewhere in 2010. This is the report of our 3 week journey across the continental USA.
NOTE: This blog was converted from our old blogger, and most of the media was salvaged. There are a few pictures that got lost in the annals of time, notably the ones from Picasaweb. Somehow, Pim forgot to make a backup (or move the albums to another, more durable, storage system). In an attempt to take control of our own media, during our 2022 Roadtrip to the North Cape, we decided to self-host the website on our own server.
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Numbers And we’re back home. Wow, what a blast! Fortunately, the flights back (SFO - JFK for both of us and then JFK - AMS for me and JFK - ZRH for Pim) were quite boring and uneventful, even with American operating 2 out of 3 of these (those flights were, of course, overbooked again but neither Pim nor myself was denied boarding). It also seems we got back just in time - AMS is closed for business today because of Icelandic volcanic ashes. Read more...
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iFlew and sushi-a-plenty Right now I’m in the car doing 70 on the freeway (i-5) to Santa Cruz and I realised that I haven’t given any update on what we did yesterday. Funny how things go .. I was just mentioning to Paul “well we didn’t even do anything yesterday” and he goes “Dude!” and it hits me - the skydive. How could I forget? :-) When we left the Samba Brazilian restaurant (where the Rodizio really was amazing! Read more...
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Las Vegas and forgotten phones The last two days we’ve been living it up in Las Vegas. We got here yesterday and spend the day walking from one side of ‘The Strip’ to the other and back. That sort of took all day - there’s so much to see, so many beautiful hotels, casino’s, people, and general buzz. We had a good steak dinner at The Strip House (which, by the way, does not refer to strippers, but to its location on ’the strip’). Read more...
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Hoover Dam We took 93 from west i40 after having a late breakfast in Flagstaff. Our trip purposely brought us to the Hoover Dam (which always makes me think fondly of the luitenant penguin from Madagascar, who yells “hoover damn!!” when things go wrong). The dam is magnificently large. It has four huge 400ft pillars on the intake side, two flanking overflow ducts the size of a 2 lane motorway, and a breathtaking drop on the egress side. Read more...
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The Canyon of all Canyons This morning we got up at around 8am, leisurely making our way to the Grand Canyon national park. It’s about 80mi from Flagstaff, and we got there at around 10:30am. Our first stop was at the local airport, to book ourselves a helicopter flight over the canyons. There were two types, the “short” (25-30min) which went from the south rim to the north rim and back, and the “long” which circled around and tracked both rims for a few miles before changing course (45-50min). Read more...
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1000 miles in a day Leaving Dallas on Wednesday night at 10:30pm, we had fallen some 5 hours behind on our original schedule (thanks again, AA). We decided to clear the Dallas / Fort Worth area as much as we could and get us some shuteye ASAP. We ended up in Weatherford, TX, some 50 miles from DFW. After breakfast at Waffle House we set the satnav to direct us to Midland, TX, where we were hoping to see some pumpjacks. Read more...
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Rapid Incompetence - 5+5=10 This cup of “coffee” is very important to me. Today has been a wonderful display of bad luck. It started in the early morning and stayed with us like the odor of a dead skunk. This blog post will be sarcastic. It will be a display of bad language. The reason is that I just don’t know how to use good words to describe what happened to us today. Read more...
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The horse in the hills After leaving the cramped plane and doing some exercises to get blood flowing again, we find ourselves in Rapid City Airport. A tiny place, compared to the ones we’ve seen on our trip so far (SFO (for Pim), JFK, DFW, DEN). It’s about 5pm mountain time when we land, so we’re worried car rental agencies may have already closed their offices for the day so we quickly head in their general direction. Read more...
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Did I hear you say Colorado? This morning we got up at 7:30am bright and early, to make sure that we were on time at the airport to get our 12:15 flight to Rapid City SD. Our travels to the airport were very light, we got there with minimal traffic, parked our trusty Jeep at the ’express south’ parking spot, and made our way directly to the B10 gate where our flight was scheduled to take us to South Dakota. Read more...
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Halfway there It’s not trivial to determine you’re halfway on your journey when you don’t know exactly how far you’re traveling. That’s why we defined we would be halfway there when passing 96.207 degrees west (for the first time). This seemingly random value was found by taking the average of the longitudes of New York and Los Angeles (the two red markers on the map). The latitude is of no concern since our route isn’t a straight line from NY to LA (we would probably need a few more BHP and 4WD for such a route). Read more...
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Smurfs, Swamps and Space We are laying lazily in the grass at the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas. Let me share with you how we got here. This morning we got up at around 7:45, had breakfast at the Comfort Inn at New Orleans int’l airport, filled up the car with gas, and headed west on 10. This is one helluva long straight road, one might argue a 100 mile bridge, because the whole thing is a 4 lane freeway on poles crossing a huge swamp. Read more...
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Far south, and the Blues This morning we got up all bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to accept our adventurous destiny in Louisiana. We thought we should go see the Misisipi (sic) delta now that we were here so we punched it it just to find that it is a 90mi drive taking about 2 hours. A piece of cake for us! So we drove down to the southernmost point ot Louisiana. Read more...
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2**11 Whoohooooot! It is around 8:40 central time and we have passed 2048 mark. It feels like just yesterday that we crossed the 1024 mark. We are pretty sure that our next mark at 4096 will take a while but it is inevitable too :-) Location : Paulding, MS 39348 Posted by Pim van Pelt at 6:44 AM Steamboat and Gumbo Pot We arrived at New Orleans pretty early, around noon. Read more...
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Knoxville? No, Nashville!!1 Paul and I woke up this morning at around 8:30am after noticing yesterday that we crossed a timezone and are now at central time. We were in Gordonsville this morning, and took an easy drive down to Nashville TN. Chris D said we had to check it out, because Knoxville was boring. I’m now no longer sure he was trying to compare Knoxville to Nashville … because while quite large, the city’s features are, well, not exciting. Read more...
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Getting our kicks! This is the first post from a real diner(tm) in virginia! We had been getting our kicks, on route 66, and programmed in a little detour: skyland VA. This is in the middle of shenandoah woods - a neck of the woods which was warmly recommended to me by andrew k in california before we started. I am now sipping my steaming hot and otherwise completely terrible coffee after ordering a low-carb breakfast: 3 eggs sunnyside up, a few strips of bacon, and a carb-free piece of toast. Read more...
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Washington and Columbia hokay, so here i am quite intoxicated from the evening, not day, of today’s magical adventure. this morning we got up at about 9:30am, after we had said to one and another that we would get up at 8am, but somehow this did not work out as planned. not to worry though, we got up, jumped into the car and (after a quick stop over at safeway for some supplies and tape to hold the phone / satnav / e-mail terminal / musicplayer / kitchensink to the dash) drove up to the smithsonian museum in the nation’s capital. Read more...
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I want to be a part of it… It was a great first day on the trip. After i made my way done to baggage claims, it became painfully clear that aa had screwed up the luggage. There were some 30 people without bags and some of them were starting to get upset. Not i… been there, lost the bags (even for good sometimes), so i was not upset at all. Read more...
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Here i am hurtling at a respectably insane speed of 950kmh in a bright shiny silver tube with wings. I am a bullet. My target is john kennedy. At the same time, paul is hurtling at roughly the same speed but in the other direction, in a blue swan, sort of like nils holgerson, and hopefully (a) without delays, as i am scheduled to land 20min ahead of schedule, and (b) with a better onboard entertainment system than mine because I don’t have one :) Read more...
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Ready, steady, … GO!! I’m sitting here in the corp apartment in Mountain View (CA) and I’ve found an ultimately cool widget that you can see on the left hand panel of the blog - it shows you the exact location (to the street level) of the Droid with Froyo ‘special sauce image’ I borrowed from my buddy at Google (thanks, Charles!!). We have tweaked the phone to send a location update every 60s (unless the battery is low, and then it sends once every 180s). Read more...
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Icelandic Eruption OMG that was some eruption! I’m sitting here safely in California, but Paul is not yet here. All of the (respectable) news sites carefully avoid saying when the various officials will clear the european and trans atlantic airspace again.. and the less respectable places mention “weeks” rather than “days”. Next Saturday 4/24 is when I’m supposed to hitch a flight from SFO to JFK (Marina and Alexis will continue from JFK to ZRH), and Paul is supposed to fly in from AMS to JFK on that same Saturday (actually, thanks to careful planning, our flights both land at 4pm and 4:05pm, which is kind of cool). Read more...
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Android Test Post Okay. Test post… we were in San Jose today, visiting the Happy Hollow zoo and park. It was a great place (they renovated/improved it recently and it really does look nice). A bit unfortunate, that some 5 million other people figured out the same thing and went there too. It was really nice (hot!) weather there, and I took a picture of Marina and Alexis. Then, when I got home, I tried to see if I could find an Android application to help me do my blogposts when I’m traveling, and I found one! Read more...
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Aerospace Horror: Part 1 So the trick on making a US roadtrip cheaper for half of the participants (Pim) is to make up a great excuse to be in the States at around the time the roadtrip starts :-) It turns out that the bi-annual promotion committee at Google is in April 2010, and I am on that committee. So I decided to fly out to the Bay Area on 4/10, stay there for two weeks, and then do the road trip from 4/24-5/15 with Paul. Read more...
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DFW-RAP booked The funniest thing. In our itinerary we are planning to take a trip to the landmark of Mount Rushmore. I of course am a bit of an ass, and I assumed that ‘south dakota’ means the state would be in the south, but little do I know.. It’s kind of funny that we europeans always laugh at the americans for not knowing much about european geography, but I will admit that I too suck at it :) Read more...
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FIPO! Oh, yes, we are totally there dude. Here’s Pim and Paul writing to you from an assorted amount of countries in the European Union (well ..) Pim is currently in Austria, booking flights with his girlfriend and daughter (and oh boy, is this going well, read on below for more details), and Paul is hanging out in the Netherlands, to see if he can match up flights to be in the same place at the same time. Read more...