Day 1: Saint Louis to Louisville

Okay, you saw the photo of the commencement of our journey, so here is the written word to accompany it…

“Day 1” amounted to nothing more than leaving work, packing my stuff, “installing” all of the road-trip-necessary electronic devices – the GPS, the iPod loaded with the world-famous, and highly sought after, playlist titled “Songs that make Dave happy,” and a new-fangled device that’s supposed to allow the charging of three iPhones simultaneously. Yeah, the latter didn’t really make good on that promise, so it will be going back to the origin of purchase.

This year our trip is a little different than in years past. For our tenth year of road tripping across these United States in search of our pastime and our national parks, we decided to bring with us, a little extra baggage…in the form of Julia’s brother, Peter. I can hear the gasps of shock and awe coming from family, friends and others as those words leap from thine visionary devices to thine nervous system for translation. Yes, a third traveler has been added, or as Hoolia refers to him – “baggage” – and, no, we aren’t crazed for allowing such a thing. More on Brother Peter later…

A few hours from both the start and end of our first leg of the journey, I realized that packing on the day of the trip was a mistake as it dawned on me that forgotten in the packing frenzy were fairly critical ingredients for a road trip to destinations such as ours. Missing from the cargo bay of the Toyota Rav4 were A) any garments for water entry at Holden Beach, North Carolina and B) my rugged foot coverings for hiking the trails in the Great Smoky Mountains. As my good friend, Mega, would type – sigh.

We reached our destination for the night in the Hoosier state, just across the liquid border from the Bluegrass state and one of my trip companions went in search of the highly sought and rarely seen hotel luggage cart. None could be located except for that to which another group of road-weary travelers had found just minutes prior to our arrival. Yes, they should have removed their items and immediately offered it to us with no question asked, but apparently they were not aware of simple Southern courtesy, nor that I am Dave. Go figure.

As I parked the people moving machine, Brother Peter and Hoolia packed-muled our belongings to the room, refusing the assistance, and still luggage cartless, hotel staff. Turns out, there are only three luggage carts for the entire hotel of 181 rooms. That’s an average of one cart per 60.3 rooms. If you assume two patrons per room, that’s one luggage cart per 120.6 guests. That’s good planning. I’m going to ask our friend, Patrick McDermott, whose laptop was borrowed/stolen for this trip, to utilize his insanely statistical brain to come up with a better plan for the Sheraton of Jeffersonville, Indiana. Get on that, sir.

And thus ended Day 1. More words and photos later…