A car is pretty much a necessity in South Dakota. At some point I decided to buy my parents' Suburu Outback, since that can handle those gravel rez roads pretty well. Once that was decided it was pretty clear that I would be roadtripping from the 'Cut to South Dakota, 1700 miles in all. I have no idea how long it takes to drive that far, but I don't think a number like 27 hours is too far off base. My parents thought it wasn't a good idea for me to drive that far solo, so my Mom volunteered to come along. Then she proceeded to organize places for us to stay all the way out. So we ended up coming up with a plan for a pretty slow, liesurely road trip, with at most five hours of driving each day. A brief rundown of the itinerary:
Day one we travel from West Hartford to my uncle's house in Marathon, NY. Day 2 we drive from Marathon to Niagara Falls. Day 3 we cut through Canada to suburban Detroit, where we will visit the Doigans. Day 4 we go from Detroit to Chicago, where we are visiting family. Day 5 we remain in Chicago. Once we leave Chicago I kind of lose track of the itinerary. I know we're spending three or four days in Iowa, going to Cedar Rapids (my Mom's hometown) and some strange transcendentalist town, and probably somewhere else. I drop my Mom off in Omaha on August 21, and she flies home, and then I tackle SoDak on my own.
I started off by taking some pictures of my house and family before I left forever.
I used to call this my house; I guess now it is my parents' house. I don't know why the lighting is so bad.
Barnaby says goodbye.
My car, all loaded up for South Dakota.
My folks.
After about 30 minutes we made it from Connecticut to Massachusetts. Soon after crossing into Massachusetts we almost had our first mishap of the trip when neither my Mom nor I was really paying attention and we got confused about which exit led to the Mass Pike. We got that all sorted out, though.
Not much longer before we made it to New York. Three states in an hour is going to be a pretty unbeatable rate for the rest of the trip, except probably when we cut through Indiana on the way to Chicago.
The highway in New York. For the first couple hours we wre on various interstates, which was pretty uneventful. Pretty through New York, though.
We stopped to eat some lunch at a rest stop in New York. I'm going to miss these kinds of trees and mountains. After a while on I-88 we had to get off for a detour. Apparently in July there was lots of flooding in the Northeast, and the interstate is still washed out. From this point we ended up taking back roads all the way to Marathon, driving through some pretty towns in upstate New York. After being in South Dakota, nothing out here really strikes me as "rural." The little towns out here seem pretty well stocked in money. Very pretty, though.
Our final destination, Bob and Colleen's house. They have a small apartment built in the back of the barn. Four rooms: a living room and kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. Inside these four rooms are three large dogs (two mastiffs and a doberman), five cats, and a parrot. Along with the four of us. There are also six more barn cats, a lot of fowl, and thirty-seven horses. My mom was kept up by the peacock downstairs in the barn strutting back and forth. I was mostly kept up by the cats trying to sleep on me.
The sun setting outside of Bob and Colleen's house.
Two of the dogs.
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