How to Road Trip Efficiently
This summer road trip season may be my last for a few years, since I will be enrolled in school again full-time starting Monday and plan to take summer classes next year. Knowing this, I decided to go on my longest trip ever: starting from my home in Illinois, I drove to Phoenix and stayed with family, then over to Pasadena, up the Central Valley to San Francisco, through the Redwood Parks to Tacoma (my hometown), then across Washington and Idaho to Bozeman where I have more family, and finally to the Black Hills of South Dakota and then home—more than 6,000 miles in all. Top: Sunset at Colonel Allensworth State Park, California. Above: The Coastal Redwood is absolutely incredible; these trees in northern California, the Giant Sequoia to the south, and the Dawn Redwood in China are the last remnants of the Cretaceous forest that once covered most of the globe, according to the placards at Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Since I’m paying tuition now and need to be frugal, road tripping ef