Trip begins

To make this read in chronological sequence I attached external fake dates to it, like "August 19, 2004" above.  Real narrative dates are like "August 11" below.
There are 2 chapters beyond the "Oregon to California" chapter in the list at right.

This was the first "blog" I (Dick Dreselly) wrote.  Later I wrote other blogs, mostly about my adventures.  Some of them:

              DresellyFly.blogspot.com

              DresellySail.blogspot.com

              DresellyUshuaia.blogspot.com

              DresellyLabrador.blogspot.com

Since this blog is about a driving trip, here's my driving history:

In 1940 I bought my first car and got a Maine license.
Got international and Vietnam licenses later.

Drove own car in 49 states and all Canadian provinces and territories except Nunavut.  Rented car in 4 Hawaiian islands.

Drove in 31 countries, including 3 Communist countries in the "Cold War", 26 in my own car.   Countries where the car wasn't mine: Greenland (1950s), Vietnam, Finland (1967), Argentina and Chile (2004).

Drove twice Maine to Alaska. Once as described in this blog, and a 1996 drive.

Drove long tough mostly-dirt roads: Canada's Dempster Highway (1996), Argentina's Ruta 40 (2004), and then-new Trans-Labrador road (2010).

Drove to furthest north (1996) and furthest south (2004) road points in the Americas.

Circumnavigated (2002) the Gulf of Mexico, using brief Scotia Prince Tampa-Yucatan ferry, and  continued to Belize, Texas, Maine.
Drove many times and widely in Mexico and Canada, mostly from Maine.

Drove in big cities:  NYC, Paris, Berlin (1964), Danang (1967), Santiago (2004), Mexico City.  The last was the worst: made Boston drivers look like career driving instructors.
These too were hectic: 1964 London delivery of new USA-equipped Austin Healey Sprite (one of 4 I've bought new): rush hour, roundabouts, left side driving.

I was concerned about safety sine 1958.   What, where and how I drove  were not always safe, but since 1958 I've had seat belts in my cars.  At first I had to install seat belts that I got from airports.

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This trip was much tamer than our 2003 circumnavigation of the Gulf of Mexico or our Journey to Ushuaia.   Unlike those trips, in this one the interstate highways and motels were familiar, corruption and poverty were not visible, and all the people spoke English, except some in California).    We left home on August 10, 2004.   We enjoyed a pretty drive through ME/NH/VT to a low quality "Quantity Inn" in Albany.

August 11:   We drove the NY Thruway and halfway across the Ontario "peninsula".

As a civil engineer I was fascinated by parts of the historic Erie Canal beside much of the Thruway.  This engineering miracle was considered impossible before it was built, and still seems so.  Engineered and overseen by two judges with zero experience as engineers or surveyors, built by the hands of Irish immigrant laborers assisted by mules, it was opened in 1825, before railroads.  The canal allowed boats pulled by horses on canal-side paths to go from New York City to the Great Lakes, opening up to development most of the USA east of the Great Plains -->  click . Consider that in about a single century, approximately a long lifetime like mine - the early 1800s to the early 1900s - most of the USA went from wilderness owned by other countries (France, Mexico, Spain, England) to mostly an industrial behemoth using planes and cars.

    

August 12:   We re-entered the USA in Michigan, continuing a fairly straight line from Maine to South Dakota.   We found the new high speed ferry across Lake Michigan was sold out, so we diverted northward to the eastern terminus of the slower old ferry Badger.

Friday the 13th:   Ferry to Wisconsin.   We shun-piked across most of that state, past many elegant multi-siloed farms like those in Pennsylvania Dutch country.  We paused at the Oshkosh airport, where the world's biggest gathering of small private planes is held each year.  We crossed the beautiful Mississippi, surprisingly wide so near its source, into Minnesota, ending the day at a motel in Albert Lea.

Each day the restaurants and motels seemed better than the ones before.   I was unable to connect to the Internet until Wisconsin.   Our new Corolla continued to please us.   Travelling through this beautiful lush green prosperous part of the USA reminded me again that, although it's sometimes hard to ignore the too-familiar warts of life like phone-voice-response-systems and our universal mortality and the IRS, still, considering how all the people before us lived and how all the people in most other countries of the world live now, we are in a very small group of the luckiest people who have ever existed.