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Oh What a Trip

Morgan McCarthy
May 9, 2016
3 min read

Who: please name all the members of your travelling party and their city of residence.

Full Trip:

Conrad Pritchard: Baltimore, MD

Elana Stroud: Baltimore, MD

Morgan McCarthy: Baltimore, MD

Part of the Trip:

Ashley Feldman: New York City, NY

Aryel Abramowitz: Philadelphia, PA

Sophie Shoemaker: Baltimore, MD

Robert Ragotte: Vancouver, BC

Where, when, why: Where did you go and for how long, and what inspired you to visit this destination? Trips should have taken place within the past year.

For spring break my friends and I decided Cancun would have to wait. Being college students, whatever we decided on doing was going to be one, low cost and two, low cost. So I booked a free flight to San Francisco with points. The plan was to commandeer a car (Elana’s mom’s) in SF and road trip up the west coast from San Francisco, making stops in Portland, Seattle, plenty of Denny’s and eventually arriving in Vancouver, BC. The Ride back would be filled with national parks.

Highlights and high points:

The John Muir Redwood Forest was one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen. As some of the oldest and largest trees on the Earth, we paled in comparison in size to the redwoods.

Cultural connection or disconnect: Describe a connection you made – or misfire or disappointment you suffered – with a person, place or thing.

Arriving at the Quileute Nation reserve in La Push, Washington, the beautiful coastline, bordering a temperate rainforest, all enclosed within a national park was breathtaking. When we pulled up with the car, we slowly rolled past ram shackled homes and a sickly looking dog moping around a yard. It was saddening to think how the great Native American tribes of our past have been reduced to an appropriated portion of land in impoverished conditions.

Biggest laugh or cry: what experience made you break down in giggles – or tears?

It had already been a 15-hour car from Vancouver when we pulled up to Crater Lake at 6:00 AM. I had seen the progression of inclement weather from sunny skies to the “entering avalanche zone” signs. Elana woke up in the backseat to view the heavy snowfall and 15-foot snow banks surrounding the parking lots and immediately vetoed waiting for the sun to rise to see the actual lake and demanded we head out immediately. After exiting Crater Lake National Park, we parked at a convenient store parking lot and slept in the car for two hours. When we woke up the car battery had died and the convenient store turned out to be abandoned. We had no help jump starting the car there…. did I mention we had about 6 hours of driving left and a plane to catch out of SF in about 10 hours.

How unexpected: What about this destination, or your experience, took you by surprise?

Portland is about an 11-hour drive from San Francisco and “the plan,” or so some parties thought, was to sleep in a motel and slowly make our way up the coast to Portland. The navigator (me) had a different idea of road tripping and wanted to spend as much time exploring Portland during the day as possible. I secretly plugged in Portland into the IPhone GPS instead of the motel and it didn’t take long of me giving suspiciously long directions before worrisome voices objected and ended up finding out that the backseat of the car would be their motel for the night…we drove straight on through to Portland and even made it for tea time at the famous Chinese Tea House – with at least most people smiling.

Momento or memory: What’s the greatest gift – a souvenir, a memory, an insight – that you came back with?

Being on the road with two of my best friends was gift enough. I’m moving to Stockholm next year, Conrad to Paolo Alto and we leave Elana behind for another year of school in Baltimore. To have a carefree week together with nothing but opportunity, positive attitudes and a bit of gas money was more than an all-inclusive tropical spring break could have offered us. We saw the red woods, had a very random St. Patricks day German Beer hall experience in Milwaukee, almost missed planes, came a few miles within running out of gas, saw a temperate rainforest, ran our phones close out of selfie space, danced, laughed and lived.