Map of First Part of Trip - Santa Barbara to Prince Edward Island

Route from Santa Barbara to Falmouth, MA

 

 

 

Route from Falmouth, MA to Prince Edward Island, Canada

 

Prologue

[Kalon]  This fairly ambitious trip will be our first real road trip.  We have traveled across the country a couple of times by car (years ago), but it was always just to get from one coast to the other.  This trip is intended to be more leisurely and more focused on enjoying the trip (the people and places that we'll visit) rather than simply completing the journey.  This seemed like a good time to schedule this as we have been able to step back from some Santa Barbara responsibilities, and we still (seemingly)have the capacity to enjoy traveling.

As the maps above suggest, the trip from SB east generally follows the southern route to the east coast and then travels north to Canada.  This part of the trip is pretty well defined: we have reservations at motels/hotels across the country and will be using our Prius (pretty crowded as we are carrying my bike inside the car).   We have not - as of this date - defined our return trip in much detail.

This will also be our first attempt at documenting our travel with a blog.  Our intention is not to blog every day, but instead when we get to places where we are spending some time.  But when we do blog we'll give you a hint as to what is coming up.  We leave on Saturday, May 30th and in two days travel to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for our first adventure.  We have to stop in Barstow, apparently, as Karen is rather fond of the "Beast of Barstow" and wants to rekindle a long-ago relationship.  (If this is too intense our trip may be over before it's started!)

[Karen]  Evidently, Kalon did not have as many interesting trips thru the desert as I had. I always looked forward to seeing the great big green cement dinosaur located somewhere west of the town of Barstow ... the sign with it named the creature 'The Beast of Barstow'. I do remember a trip with Kalon where we talked my father into traveling with us in an old Greenbrier Chevy van to see the Grand Canyon - I think Chris and Lonnie (his nickname then) were along as Grandpa T and I spent most of the day picking up the then toddlers out of the ash filled camp fire pit as we waited for Kalon to reappear from down in the canyon - he was 'only going to hike partway down' but true to form was part of the way down in only 10 minutes so decided to keep going all the way to the Colorado River. To mollify his wife he picked up some cots for us to sleep on when he staggered back to camp. On the way back home the Chevy van broke down and some kindly people drove my father and I and the kids into Barstow where we got a motel room to await the arrival of Kalon in a rescue van he borrowed from my brother-in-law Bill Brown.

Ruth remembers Barstow as the place where they had a sign that declaimed 'If you lived here, you would be home by now!'  'As if that would be a positive!' she said.