Cross Country Travel

The family that I grew up in was not very adventurous. We lived on a dairy farm, which meant every morning and evening the cows needed to be milked. This was in the day before the big bulk milk productions of today. My father had four automatic milk cans that would be placed on the cows, but they had to be manually moved from cow to cow. He milked eighty cows so this took quite a while to do. We then had to sterilize all the equipment to get ready for the next milking. The cows were on a twelve house schedule so they were milked at 4:30 AM and 4:30 PM. With feeding cleaning and sterilizing this gave us at most an eight hour window to be away from home during the day. In order to take a vacation we had to hire a person to come in and do the milking. It was not easy to find someone that wanted the responsibility or time commitment as a result we did not travel extensively.

Being tied to home did not seem to bother my brother or sister, but it drove me crazy. I wanted to see some of the sights that my friends talk about seeing and that I saw on television. Starting in college I began cross county travel experiences. My college roommate was from Colorado. She came to Minnesota, my home state, because her grandmother lived here. She asked me to come home with her during the spring break that year. That was my first taste of cross country travel and I was hooked. We rode the grey hound bus to her parent’s house and then we drove one of her parents cars back. She wanted to have a car so she could bring her things home after school was out. Because of the travel time we did not get a chance to do a lot of things in Colorado, but the parts of it I saw I fell in love with. I had never seen mountains before. I could not stop looking at them or taking pictures. I think I came home with four rolls of film with mountain scenes on them.

Since that first road trip I have done a great deal of cross country travel. I love driving to different parts of the country because you can veer off and take side trips and see parts of states that are not commercialized. By taking these side trips you get a true feel for the people of the region as well as the economy and values of the area. My goal is to physically go to all fifty states. I have been in thirty two states at this time, however some of places I flew to. My preference is to cross country travel to get the best feel for the area I am visiting.