Hey everyone. I know it’s been a week, and I really don’t have any excuses for my absence. The last you heard from me I was in Chicago shortly after the 4th of July. After I left Chicago I started my descent into the true Midwest. I spent the night (the 6th) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (which apparently against some force of physics has five seasons) and visited the college town of Madison, Wisconsin (on the 7th). Last Thursday is where things started to get chaotic and thrown off schedule. It was supposed to be my night (the 8th) in Minneapolis, but due to some bad planning on my part, I couldn’t get directions to my friend’s place I was staying that night, so in a moment of spontaneity I started driving to North Dakota. I figured that I would drive overnight to Dickinson, North Dakota, where I would be staying the next day, and just bide the time and have my schedule correct itself. Well, I made it about 50 miles into North Dakota and got sleepy. The rest areas had “No overnight parking” signs, so I pulled off into a roach motel in Jamestown, North Dakota and slept like a baby.
The next day (the 9th) I awoke to a new problem. Before I left on the trip I had sort of spread my money around, which seemed like a smart idea, but the money on my debit card was almost completely gone, which meant I had to drive to an actual banking center to withdraw the rest of my money so I could finish the trip. It is a large and widely known bank (I won’t say which branch), but it didn’t have any branches in North or South Dakota, and the closest branch was on the South Dakota/Iowa border. So I went down to southeast South Dakota that night, and went to the bank the following day (the 10th). So I was a day ahead in my itinerary since I didn’t spend a night in Minnesota, and I didn’t know what to do. I was getting sick of the road, and wanted to see my family and friends back home. I honestly considered driving to Texas at that point and save most of the thousand bucks I still had left. But I knew that this trip was bigger than me at this point, and the premise of the book would only left if I saw all 48 states. I thought about starting doing 2 states a day, or just driving straight through the Midwest and getting to the West Coast and finishing the trip from there. But I had come this far and would have never been able to forgive myself if I had bailed after I had gotten so far. So instead I decided to stay on schedule, but change my itinerary a little bit, to shorten the amount I had to drive, but at the same time still see all of the states.
From South Dakota (technically the bank in Iowa), I went to Nebraska and Kansas, and stayed with a cousin of mine in Denver last night. Now I am in south central Wyoming. Wyoming seems very primal. There is really not much around, at all. No crops, no foliage, nothing, just raw earth stretched out to the horizon. I am suspecting that nothing noteworthy will happen until I reach the west coast, but I am back, and I will be updating at least semi-daily again until I get home, which is less than 2 weeks away!
