Day 1 Oh, the Places We’ll Go!
Atlanta, Georgia
Alabama —> Mississippi
New Orleans, Louisiana
You may be asking, where do 2 jobless wanderers wander to? We asked ourselves the same question about 2 months ago as we neared the end of the year and the final weeks before Tom left his job. We first pondered going someplace abroad like South America or Europe for our first trip together - fully liberated from our jobs, our schedules and with no boundaries to where we could go - except for COVID travel restrictions and/or complications.
However, as recently as October, we traveled to St. Lucia in the Caribbean and were limited by a strict curfew everyday, increasingly complex and ever changing country entry and exit requirements and the looming concern of testing negative for COVID in order to return home. With all of this taken into consideration, we decided that to really enjoy ourselves in an unrestricted way, we should stay stateside and road trip in our home country, the United States. My boundless wanderlust typically takes me away from my home state and country. Yet, I often feel that I haven’t spent enough time in the more recent past exploring the many diverse states in America to have an honest, true perspective of the current state of our nation. This is our chance to get to know some of America as we stand today.
I mentioned before that our marriage got off to a hell of a start. Just 8 days after our wedding day, COVID had officially hit the nation and the data showed it was rapidly spreading. Tom and I were in Steamboat Springs, Colorado on the ski slopes enjoying our mini-moon ski trip when the announcement swept the mountain that the slopes were closed down across Colorado. We were fortunate enough to spend the next 2 days around the town of Steamboat before the town started to quiet. We even made it on our flight home with no disruptions, but when we returned home to Atlanta, the world closed down and everyone was quarantined.
We haven’t had another chance to hit the slopes or make it back to Colorado to finish our intended mini-moon trip so Steamboat Springs, Colorado quickly became our goal destination. While hopeful, we’re not too idealistic about finally getting to have the 2 amazing days of skiing and snowboarding that never were back in 2020. Keep your fingers crossed that we can make it to fresh powder at the top of the mountain by next week!
Road trip route across the U.S.
As for the other places we’ll be visiting:
Tom and I have both always wanted to explore the national parks in the country. Though, we’d previously reserved some of those excursions for later in life when we couldn’t travel internationally as easily. So this seemed like an opportunistic time to tap into our treasure trove of natural phenomena and explore some of our country’s hidden gems along the way.
I’d not yet been to New Orleans, Louisiana nor Austin, Texas and both are en route to Colorado. We also wanted to visit friends and family in the state where everything is bigger, Texas! An awesome couple we met at our resort in St. Lucia - Judge and Kameron - live in El Paso and my cousin from my dad’s side, Chris, lives in Houston.
To finalize our route, we mapped out all of the places we planned to visit and identified the national parks that were along the path and of interest. The Carlsbad Caverns, Mesa Verde, and on our return, Mammoth Caves were the 3 of choice. And now…let’s wander!
