Taking off again for the summer!

Hello! It’s been quite a long time since I last had anything noteworthy to share with you all. The last time I posted, I was kind of miserable and wet as I was coming back into Austin from my trip out to Reno for Hot August Nights.

Well! I didn’t want to shock you all with too much of a change all at once, so I’ve planned this year’s trip accordingly, making sure to keep the “Hot August Nights” and “miserable and wet in the vicinity of Austin” themes! Yes, this year I will be going back to Hot August Nights. More on the second theme later…

I am actually already on the road, but things have been hectic so I haven’t had the time to divulge any details of this trip yet. This is because in true Kelly fashion, I waited until a couple of weeks before the trip to suddenly decide to address a variety of issues that have been bothering me for years. Yes, years – most of the time I consider things to be “close enough” so I lack the motivation to fix them, but on a long trip I’d rather have the car as close to tip-top shape as possible (which is hilarious, because we all know that “tip-top shape” is often not very long-lived if Jane has anything to say about it). And so I found myself scrambling to prep the car the day before leaving, having recently replaced two wheel cylinders, a brake line, the coil springs, a piece of the upper control arm, the valve stem seals, a rocker stud, an intake gasket, a part of the clutch linkage, and a speedometer. I also did all of the normal 30,000 mile maintenance – basic tune-up, plugs, repack the brake bearings, grease everything, check alignment, new filters, etc. Did I mention that I did this when it was over 100*F in my garage? Because I did and it was terrible.

Anyways, I managed to scrape Jane (and myself) back together with enough time for a 6- to 7-week trip for this summer! So this year will be another big trip similar to the one I took in 2014 that spanned 10,051 miles over nearly 8 weeks. The difference is that this year, I’ll be including A WHOLE DIFFERENT COUNTRY in my itinerary! Yes, I will be making an appearance in “the Great White North”, as we call it. Gotta throw in some gimmicks to keep these trips of mine fresh, you know.

It’s Canada’s 150^th birthday this year and to celebrate they are giving away free passes to all of their National Parks! I’m never one to pass up something free (even if it would have only cost me 20 bucks otherwise), so that prompted me to build a trip around a visit up to two of Canada’s most famous parks: Banff and Jasper. I’ve heard that the beauty of these parks is unparalleled and can’t wait to see what they have to show me. Visiting those two parks will also conveniently have the effect of negating all of the sweating I’ve done in the 100+ degree Texan temperatures I’ve experienced in the past few weeks.

In addition to the Canadian parks, I’ll be hitting somewhere around 13 parks inside the good old USA. The plan is to do a big giant loop of the western half of the States with stops in places like Glacier, Olympic, Sequoia, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I’ll keep the rest of the locations secret for now, of course, since I don’t like to divulge where I’m going too far ahead of time. But rest assured that I’ll be doing some great hiking and driving through more of the most beautiful country that the North American continent has to offer.

I’m off to hit the road now – I’ve got a long drive ahead of me, courtesy of yesterday’s fiasco. Remember the “miserable and wet in the vicinity of Austin” theme I referenced earlier? Yeah, that has something to do with that. More on that in the next post. Stay tuned!

Kelly

P.S. – For those of you that want to read my blog but periodically forget to check up, I’ve set up a mailing list right there in the sidebar. Add your email address and I’ll email you when I’m on the road and have things to share! To avoid being obnoxious, I won’t email you more than once a week even when I’m on the road (unless something particularly hilarious or noteworthy happens to me that must be shared immediately, of course).