Following our first fully equipped road trip in the fall of 1992, and encouraged by our enjoyment of it, we planned a greater and longer trip. In the fall of 1993 my companions and I went on a road trip to see the West Coast of the US and then return home eastward along the Columbia river gorge through Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas. This was a much longer trip than had been done before and took about 4 weeks. It did, however, by its success, set the standard both in duration (about one month) and distance (12,000 to 18,000 km) for many subsequent road trips. Here is a list of the places we visited:

A big interest in all of our travel is the geology of the regions through which we travel. A very good set of books is the “Roadside Geology Series”. This series covers each state and provides highway by highway geology lessons! A general theme in our travels on the west coast was the Cascade Range. A particularly useful reference on these volcanic mountains is “Fire Mountains of the West” by Stephen L. Harris.

To begin our trip, we entered our ‘power travel’ mode and blasted across the states in 3.5 days. Our first day, from Toronto takes us to Moline, Illinois thence through Iowa and Nebraska to North Platte, thence across Wyoming and Utah to Salt Lake City, and then the long haul across Nevada to California where our last stop before San Fran was at Auburn. We did stop to see a few things on the way, but only briefly — our main objective was road miles. Once at San Francisco we stayed for a week as the Interop Conference was coincident with our trip and it could be charged as a business expense!