What is this road trip?

When I started planning this road trip, it was pretty simple. I needed to get to Denver for the Creating Change Conference (www.creatingchange.org). Then I realized I was going to be in DC right before Denver, so I could just combine them. Then I realized that I should probably do some college visiting while I was there, so I made plans to see a couple schools. Which blossomed into a few more schools, and some friends. It quickly became clear that flying wasn’t going to work— I had too many short trips to make it time or cost effective. I then looked at taking Greyhound buses, and found out that they were pretty much as expensive as flying, but took much longer, and were super sketchy. Then I looked at Amtrak, and discovered that they weren’t sketchy, and that I could experience gorgeous scenery while going through a couple of states I had yet to visit. On the longer haul routes (say, DC-Denver and Portland, OR-Minneapolis) the train takes much more time than flying, but on the shorter trips they are pretty comparable. My final decision was made when I learned of the USA Rail Pass. It lets me take 12 train trips anywhere in the U.S. (a trip is anytime I get off a train) in a 30 day time period.

So, that’s why and how I am doing this particular trip. But the bigger reason that I have the freedom to do a trip like this is because I just graduated high school this January. I graduated a semester early for a variety of reasons, one of which is because I wanted opportunities to do things like this trip!