It's been a busy week as @mrsbozz and I have been on the road making our way across part of the US and back. In fact, when you actually read this post we will probably still be a day or two away from home. It's been an amazing journey and I have learned a couple new things in that time. I wanted to share some of them here with you in this post.
Consider it advice if you want. If not, think of it as the random ramblings of a mad man. I will leave that up to you.
As I get older the less I enjoy driving
This one actually has a variety of reasons. I've covered some of them in the past, but I have some new reasons now too. First of all, people are nuts! They are so distracted and in a hurry to get to their destination (myself included) that safety seems to go out the window. It's just a stressful experience to drive anymore. While I used to enjoy it, often feels like I am seconds or inches away from a major accident and that scares the crap out of me.
Second, I just can't hang like I used to. I often made the ten hour drive down to my sisters on the boarder of Illinois and Missouri with little issue. These days, I max out at about seven or eight hours and then I am spent.
Finally, I just miss to much. As you will see in some of my future posts, @mrsbozz had to take the majority of the photos I share because I had to focus on driving. In fact, all the photos in this post can be attributed to her. This has become more of an issue since I started blogging on HIVE. I look forward to the day we all have self driving cars so I can just sit back and enjoy the view and let the car do all the work.
Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas get a bad rap
I've gotta be honest, people often call these states "fly over states" and don't give them the credit they are due. I expected a vast emptiness before I started my drive, the truth is, Nebraska, Iowa, and even Kansas as you get closer to Topeka have rolling hills and large stretches of green space that literally take your breath away.
It totally blew my mind to be honest. I'm not saying I would want to do it all the time, but I have found it a lot more enjoyable than I actually thought I would.
Colorado doesn't get interesting until the middle
Piggybacking off the last point. Colorado was a lot different than I expected as well. I rode on a bus out to Colorado a long time ago, but we had drivers driving through the night and we also had friends to chat and play games with, so I don't remember a ton of the ride.
I was really shocked to find that the first two hours driving in Colorado are downright boring. Even more boring and depressing than I expected Kanas to be. It's funny because you probably expect to see mountains right away, but instead you get a whole bunch of flat brown nothingness. I took two routes through Colorado and so far I have to say that I-70 from Denver to the Kansas state line is just miserable!
It's never a bad idea to rent a car
Sure, I have a car and it might not make sense to be spending large sums of money to rent a car when I already own one. After driving through the rocky mountains, I'm actually glad we didn't bring one of our own vehicles. I'll cover this more in a future post, but I am pretty sure our rental car is going to need new brakes when they get it back from us. I had those puppies burning hot and squealing like a stuck pig coming down from Rocky Mountain National Park.
It's also kind of fun to be able to drive it like you stole it. I'm a lot harder on this vehicle than I would be on our personal cars. It's nice not having to worry about the extra maintenance that is going to be required to this machine after clocking over 2000 miles on it.
Sure, there are a few drawbacks, but overall, I stand by my decision to rent a car for this trip.
There's never enough time.
We were in Denver for just about eight days which might seem like a long time, but it wasn't even close to enough time. Some of that time was spent on the softball fields watching my niece play, but even without that time, we could have been running non stop and still wouldn't have been able to seen everything.
I'm not really sure how you fix this one, it's just something I noticed and I wanted to put down here. Especially when you are visiting a large city or a national park, there are just way too many things to do. I'd guess that if you tried to do them all, you would either be miserable or collapse from exhaustion.
I know it isn't feasible for everyone, but sometimes it just makes more sense to plan multiple trips to the same area instead of trying to fit it all into a single trip.
This trip to Colorado was absolutely amazing and my wife and I agreed we would definitely come back again. I'm not sure I would drive next time even though I am not really a fan of flying. I'm really looking forward sharing my travels with you in some future posts. I hope you find it as exciting as I did.
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
