Arriving home after a long trip is a little like stepping onto land that you visited long ago and have little memory of. You know you've been there before, but it doesn't feel familiar; you feel disconnected, even though you know you belong. It takes a while to get back that sense that it's home, to return to a routine that's familiar, to realize that you've returned to the life you temporarily set aside in favor of new adventures. Part of doing this requires examining where you've been, where you are, and where you're going.

One of the things that is encouraged by an Evergreen education is the art of self-reflection and the ability to vocalize your own achievements in a objective manner. In fact, the student's own self evaluation forms one of the cornerstones of an Evergreen transcript, which can easily reach upwards of 40 pages through a person's four- or five-year collegiate career. I greatly value this skill, because it can really be applied to anything, including road trips.

I picked perhaps one of the most beautiful places in the U.S. for this first road trip. The scenery was beautiful, despite the smoky haze from the nearby wildfires. I didn't allot nearly as much time as I should have, at least for Yellowstone - Grand Teton National feels a lot like it's intended for those who like to do extensive hiking. Hiking is something I like to do, so I might have to plan in some hiking the next time I'm there.

There were certainly some small gotchas with this trip that caught me by surprise. For instance, on day 2, we wound our way across northern Idaho on Highway 12, which, on a map, didn't look like it would take all that long. I didn't figure on the twists and turns, the lower speed limits (in the 45mph range at times), and the amount of time it would take to cover the state. We did it in roughly 12 hours, but severely overestimated our ability to get to Butte, which had been our original destination.

We also didn't plan out the return route terribly well until the night before we left Jackson Lake Lodge - now, this actually worked fairly well, considering that we got to stop in spots that were appropriate for the amount of time and the number of miles I wanted to drive per day. Driving a Prius has benefits, in that we only really consumed a tank of gas a day (not even that on some shorter days). The thing we had to keep in mind as we cut back along Highway 20, though, was the amount of distance between services such as food and gas, which did toss in a few twists at times, but never prohibited us from getting what we needed.

Being able to not plan ahead worked fairly well in selecting some of the sights we wanted to see, especially in Grand Teton National. This was to our disadvantage, though, in Yellowstone, which truly does deserve several weeks of exploration rather than the day and a quarter we devoted to it. We were right in picking a side of the park that we most wanted to see (in our case, Mammoth Hot Springs) and sticking to it, but we deviated a bit from this pattern.

From the writing side of it, this worked fairly well and hopefully engaged you, my faithful reader, in my (mis)adventures. I thank you for all the comments and suggestions along the way. The only thing I might improve the next time is the contests and the photos associated with the blow-by-blow commentary - most worked, but some weren't composed quite the way I would've liked.

So, in sum, here's what I've learned:

There are, of course, other lessons, but these are the ones that stick out most. I'm hoping to do another trip again soon, so stay tuned!

Until next time.