Our journey began on Tuesday, September 25, 2018. We left Aurora, IL to pursue our dream of traveling the country in our van, rock climbing everything we can find, and loving life and each other along the way. I’d say we got off to a good start, zipping up through Cedar Falls, IA and Minneapolis, MN to visit a few of Adam’s old friends. Our one obligation was to pick up our German friend, Micha, in Rapid City, SD on Sept. 27th. We made it just in time for his flight, then backtracked an hour to meet a couple of good Chicago friends at the Badlands National Park. Zoey and Michelle had left Chicago on the same day as us, loaded in their van with their dog, beginning their journeys across the states as well. What a perfect opportunity to begin our trip with some fun, friendly people.
Badlands National Park as well as Mount Rushmore were quickly checked off our list as we made our way toward our main objective, Devil’s Tower. Micha is a climbing friend of mine that I met in Berlin and we have climbed in 4 countries together so far. The Tower was on his bucket list, and as we looked into how much it was going to cost us to hire a guide to take us up the tower (we recognize the limits of our climbing knowledge), we realized it would cost about the same to just ship him out here to be our pretend guide for a couple weeks. So for 12 of our first 14 days in the van, we had a house guest. It was great. We worked well as a team and figured out how things work, and it gave us the opportunity to dive head first into the climbing portion of our goals, which was amazing, considering neither Adam nor I climbed much at all in the few months leading up to this trip.
After a few demanding days on Devil’s Tower, the weather turned and we had to flee. We drove South to Colorado where we visited more friends from Adam’s childhood who cooked us an epic homemade Turkish meal including a most amazing pear pie. We bouldered with Micha at Horsetooth Reservoir, sport climbed in Boulder Canyon, partied with my cousin and her friends, and ate a lot of cinnamon buns before we dropped Micha off at the Denver airport.
The next couple of weeks were spent indoors mostly, as the weather didn’t get nice again for a while. We climbed at 3 different gyms and visited the plethora of friends that we have in the area. Apparently it’s a lot. We didn’t even hit them all. But we got one more really decent day of climbing in at Clear Creek, and we left the area feeling happy and strong.
To begin our trip with so many incredible friends and family was an amazing way to start. It allowed us to stay slightly within our comfort zone while we begin something that we cannot yet even fathom the magnitute of. It helped us feel grounded, tied to our roots, reinforcing our connections with some very important people. It reminded me that most of my best friends are climbing friends, and how grateful I am for the climbing community that I’ve found myself a part of. It also freed us from all real obligations to see people. From now on, we are on our own, flowing with the river of circumstance. The real adventure starts now, just the three of us, as we drive away from the comfort of the familiar, into the winding countryside of the unknown, spectators on the sidelines as life happens to us.