Tag: The Great Outdoors

Go Alone, Go Fast; Go Together, Go Far

A couple of weeks ago, my husband V and I drove from Virginia out to Washington state to see my dad and stepmom. My stepmom has been ill and we wanted to spend some time with her and help out my dad. My brother C and my stepbrother J with his family were also planning to be there. Although this was my fourth cross-country trip to the west coast and back in the last 13 months, it was the first one where I didn’t go alone.

As the African proverb from which I borrowed the title of this post tells us, we can get somewhere fastest on a schedule that doesn’t account for the needs of any other travelers, but going the distance often requires more support. Although I have proven with my last year of solo road trips that I can go both fast and far alone, I can also acknowledge there have been plenty of times when having another driver and companion would’ve made the trip more enjoyable (and less worry-inducing for my parents?). And I certainly experienced that on this trip.

My Top Tips for Long-Distance Solo U.S. Road Trips

People are typically surprised to hear I’ve driven from the east coast to the west coast and back alone not just once, but three times during the last 12 months. I suppose it is surprising given the distance, sometimes even to me. Of course, there are times flying to one’s destination makes the most sense. After all, I’ve lived abroad five times and until the pandemic, flew on planes like it was my job. But I absolutely LOVE driving. In 2022 I took six major solo-driver road trips, totaling a whopping 22,127 miles. I’ve continued that trend in March 2023 with my biggest solo cross-country trip yet: a personal record of 7,963 miles. Not only did I take the scenic route behind the wheel as sole driver, on five of the seven trips I was also totally alone.

Although solo road trips are something I deeply enjoy, I recognize the inherent risk. I don’t necessarily recommend someone “endurance drive” if they feel it it’s a bad idea for them. Many people have told me driving all day is boring or makes them sleepy. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been taking five-hour road trips alone and have almost never felt this way. While there are plenty of things in life I find hard to do, driving for long periods isn’t one of them. But to whatever extent it is or isn’t your thing, there are ways to make it easier. Whether a cross-country solo road trip sounds like fun or slightly insane to contemplate, in order to answer the questions I keep getting about how I do this… here in no particular order are my top 25 tips for road tripping as safely as possible in the United States, especially if I go alone.

Postcard from Spring in DC/VA

The first day of summer arrived earlier this week and brought oppressive humidity and rainstorms to the DC metro area. Fortunately, my mom had planned her recent 10-day visit to see us right before spring officially ended, and we had plenty of near-perfect weather to enjoy the fun activities this area offers in spring. Although both V and I were too busy at work to really take time off, and I was in the middle of SIP bidding, I can’t say the days at home were boring! They were more for recovery, as we packed in plenty of fun non-working hour events and made new memories with my mom. I shared with her my dad’s joke from his 2018 visit with my stepmom to us in Australia: “I’m going to have to leave your place in an ambulance.” She laughed because we still have limited chill when it comes to entertaining visitors.

Her visit was also a good reminder to us both to better embrace the touristy benefits of being posted to DC for a domestic tour.

Pelicans Galore

Last month, my husband V and I took a few days off and connected them to a weekend, heading to a five-day beach house rental on North Carolina’s Carolina Beach and kicking off the first of many fun summer plans. I (inadvertently) got a scorching sunburn, fell asleep each humid night hearing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crash into the sandy shore, saw a record two dozen pelicans at once, ate lots of good food, and even saw my favorite band. The weather was a little stormier than I’d expected, but we had about a day and a half of good beach time without a chilly wind. And the best thing: downtime with V where we didn’t have to think about work.

Festival of Spring at Burnside Farms

Over Easter weekend in early April, V and I went to the Festival of Spring at Burnside Farms in Nokesville, Virginia. Located less than 90 minutes from our home in Alexandria, the farm has planted 70 acres of tulips and daffodils every spring since 2012. Tickets can be difficult to come by, as peak bloom is unpredictable and most of the short three-week season’s tickets are snapped up as soon as they are announced. Other than a summer sunflower festival and Christmas tree farm sales in winter, Burnside Farms is more or less closed to the public.

Open Skies to the Pacific Northwest

As I mentioned in my Road Trips 2022 post, last year was a big road trip year for me.

I took five major U.S. road trips and one European road trip in 2022, racking up over 22,000 miles as a solo driver across five countries and 28 states. And that was after a relative lot of road miles during the years since we’d returned from our second diplomatic tour in Australia already: in 2019 we drove over 2,000 miles through Hawaii, followed by California, Oregon, and Washington; in 2020 we moved by car from Virginia to Mexico and once we were settled took a jaunt up to Alamogordo, NM; and in 2021 I crossed the border on smaller road trips both alone and with my husband to Las Cruces, to California and Arizona, to Carlsbad, Cloudcroft, San Antonio and Fort Worth, and Albuquerque.

Apparently the driving didn’t get old, because last month I was ready to jump back behind the wheel and drive all the way to the west coast by myself again.

New Year, New Scenes

At the beginning of 2023, I made a commitment to spend more time during the months of January and February hiking in new places. There are so many parks and trails in northern Virginia I’ve never seen despite having lived here for eight years off and on.

The new year is always a good time for me to get motivated about a goal, cheesily enough, and I think exercising outdoors in the cold feels better than during the hot, humid times as Virginia marches from late spring into summer.

Year in Review: 2022 Blog Stats and Recap

For me, 2022 was a profoundly strange year, filled with ups and downs. We finalized adopting our cat and moved from Mexico to Virginia, I succeeded in my 100-lb weight loss goal, took a road trip to Florida, started my fourth tour in Washington, DC, and visited the west coast three times in one year. I got promoted, saw my favorite band live, took fun beach trips with my husband, and took a family trip to Europe. But I also was knocked off-center by the traumatic death of an old friend, struggled at times to learn my new job, and dealt with illness – both my own and that of multiple family members.

First Christmas “At Home” in Eight Years

If we were to discuss what sucks most about the Foreign Service lifestyle, the majority of Foreign Service Officers would agree missing holidays or special occasions with family back home ranks near the top of the list.

Last December I went to the west coast to see my parents for Christmas. It marked our first Christmas holiday together since 2014 when I got a few days’ reprieve from full-time, mandatory Russian language training and flew with V to my mom’s for Christmas. If someone would have told me back then I wouldn’t come back for Christmas until 2022, I would’ve been dumbfounded.

On the Road Again: Coast to Coast

As I mentioned in my Road Trips 2022 roundup post last December, I not only drove by myself from northern Virginia to the west coast in June, but also in November to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. I left at the end of a busy work day the Thursday before the holiday, fighting my way through rush-hour traffic on the beltway to get a head start on my journey.

And as usual when you’re trying to leave the office for a couple of weeks at a time, I had an active international parental child abduction case with two children returning to the United States from Venezuela in-progress that very afternoon. Thanks to the help of my excellent colleagues, I was able to track the return up until I needed to walk out the door, and then hand the case off to my backup. As I crossed my first mountain pass in Pennsylvania’s Alleghenies against pelting snow, she worked to monitor the landing of the children’s flight in Miami and update our leadership on their reunification with the left-behind parent. When I finally checked into my motel in Ohio and caught up with my work emails very late at night, I was elated to see all was well that ended well. Fortunately for me, my road trip went just as smoothly.

Mental Health is Health

I’m continuing to catch up with blog posts from a few months ago to bring us to the present day. September 2022 marked one year since the death of my longtime friend T who I met in 1998 and who was my boyfriend off and on for a few years while I was in college. It hardly seemed possible a year had elapsed, since I’d only learned in April that he’d already been gone for seven months. It still felt new and unfathomable to me. In an attempt to find answers and process his passing, I’d gone to California in May and visited his grave, worked on a memorial plaque, and found lots of books and podcasts about suicide and grief.

In honor of T’s life and September being National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, I tried some volunteer activities I’d hoped would help me feel like I was doing something that mattered. I couldn’t help the one person I really wanted to try and help, so maybe I could help someone else. But I slowly began to understand I couldn’t “action” away my grief with memorial or suicide prevention activities, nor did “grief brain” allow me the ability to take on a lot of new information or tasks. As time passed and my shock wore off, I actually felt worse as people were expecting me to start feeling better. I saw I needed to take a step back to process. Because grief is an individual journey and everything you feel when grieving is normal and OK, even if it doesn’t meet others’ expectations or even your own.

FS Domestic Tours: New Neighborhood, New Equilibrium

As I have surely mentioned in the past, Foreign Service Officers receive housing as an employment benefit while serving overseas or while stateside for training. However, when actually serving in a domestic assignment, whether it’s a year, two years, or more, officers have to arrange and pay for their own housing. And a domestic assignment usually means a tour in Washington, DC – – one of the most expensive regions of the country. Many officers (and in particular single officers who have to manage on one salary) try and delay a domestic tour until they are well beyond entry-level pay for this reason, but it cannot always be helped.

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VII: Sarajevo to Skopje via Kruševac

The sunny August morning we left Sarajevo, it was harder than I thought it would be to find our way out of town. I don’t remember exactly why; some combination of narrow streets and Google Maps trying to lead me onto a pedestrian footpath might have had something to do with the smell of burning clutch and frayed nerves in the morning.

V, A and I worked together and managed to make a series of navigational decisions that – while not winning any efficiency awards – also didn’t result in any fender benders. Thankfully at least, when hearing how early we wanted to get on the road, our AirBnB host decided he didn’t need to do our checkout in-person after all and allowed us to lock the apartment and hide the key in an agreed-upon location. We eventually hit the highway east and later, due south for the last few hundred miles of our road trip.

Balkan Summer Trip 2022, Part V: Dubrovnik Old Town

On our second full day at the beach house, we woke up early, took a quick swim, and ate breakfast on the patio in preparation to go to old town. Initially the plan was for me to drive us the 12 minutes to the old quarter and find a place to park, but as I was dealing with some extreme vertigo out of the blue while getting ready, V and A – after lingering a while in the hopes I wouldn’t be delayed – were eventually convinced to take an Uber there without me. I had been unsuccessful in averting my head-spinning situation, and ended up vomiting several times, taking a Dramamine, and lying down. My head felt like a yo-yo on the end of a string, and as I lay still and miserable I had to keep one foot on the floor and a hand on the wall to avoid zero gravity sensations. But as is typical and hard to explain, my stomach did not hurt at all. After about a 90-minute nap, I reawoke in the silence of the empty house to the waves crashing outside. I sat up cautiously and ate some fake Pringles. The dizziness had subsided and it was as if it had never happened. I was going to old town.

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part IV: Višegrad to Dubrovnik

It took us nearly five hours to drive the last 150 miles of winding mountain roads between Višegrad, Bosnia & Herzegovina and the Croatian coast. I rarely drove faster than 45 mph simply because the speed limit and conditions didn’t allow it, and I likely would have made even myself carsick. V and A were excellent passengers. V only complained once, and he was probably right; it really can be alarming to be a passenger and have no control as you roll through narrow tunnels black as night, uphill past slow trucks that drift into your lane, and around blind corners, every once in a while a bit too fast even with a driver as pokey as myself. We crossed the Croatian border without incident and the vast jewel of the Adriatic lay before us.

The Dark Passport

A record of worldwide travel

Diplomatic Briefing

Your exclusive news aggregator handpicked daily!

What's Up With Tianna?

A Millennial's Musings of the World.

Adventures With Aia:

A senior project travel blog

Kumanovo-ish

Stories from a mid-west girl in Macedonia

Nina Boe in the Balkans

This blog does not represent the US government, Peace Corps, or people of North Macedonia.

DISFRÚTELA

Live well & Enjoy.

Latitude with Attitude

Exploring the World Diplomatically

try imagining a place

some stories from a life in the foreign service

Bag Full of Rocks

My rocks are the memories from different adventures. I thought I would just leave this bag here.

Carpe Diem Creative

A soulful explorer living an inspired life

thebretimes

Time for adventure

Trailing Spouse Tales

My Life As An Expat Abroad

silverymoonlight

My thoughts.

Wright Outta Nowhere

Tales from a Serial Expat

from the back of beyond

Detroit --> Angola --> Chile --> Cambodia--> India

anchored . . . for the moment

the doings of the familia Calderón

travelin' the globe

my travels, my way

Collecting Postcards

Foreign Service Officer and Returned Peace Corps Volunteer

a rambling collective

Short Fiction by Nicola Humphreys

The Unlikely Diplomat

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls. – Anais Nin

DiploDad

Foreign Service Blog

Six Abroad

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all." - Helen Keller

A Diplomat's Wife

just another story

bama in the balkans

Experiences of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Macedonia

Twelve Knots

My Journey to the Foreign Service

Notes From Post

A Diplomat's Life Abroad

Around the World in Thirty Years

A little ditty about our adventures in the Foreign Service

memories over mohinga

a peace corps memoir

Bembes Abroad

Our Expat Adventures

Nomads By Nature: The Adventures Continue

We are a foreign service family currently posted in Windhoek, Namibia!!

Diplomatic Baggage

Perspectives of a Trailing Spouse, etc.

Culture Shock

Staying in the Honeymoon Phase

I'm here for the cookies

A trailing husband's vain search for cookies in an unjust world

The Good Things Coming

CLS Korea, Fulbright Uzbekistan, TAPIF in Ceret, and everywhere in between

The Trailing Spouse

My life as a trailing husband of a Foreign Service Officer

In-Flight Movie

Our Adventures in the Foreign Service

ficklomat

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” -Cloud Atlas

Intentionally International

Defining Global Citizenship

According to Athena

Our family's adventures in the Foreign Service, currently the USA

Diplomatic Status

Tales from My Foreign Service Life

Kids with Diplomatic Immunity

Chasing two kids around the globe

The Wanderlust Diaries

A fine WordPress.com site