Days 34 & 35 - Penn State and The End of the Road

Day 34 and 35

Outer Banks, NC> PENN STATE!!!!> Southampton, PA (and Dix Hills, NY)

27 States and 9500 miles later...

            As our amazing 9500 mile cross country trip was coming to a close, we set out for one last stop. We set out for the place where it all began: PENN STATE. After earning a coveted seat in the car, we managed to take along Matt Leven, John’s younger brother for a night of Penn State debauchery. It was an 8 hour drive from the Outer banks of North Carolina to Penn State, but we set off early ensuring a full day of glory. We arrived around 3 to surprise our friends including Ray who was hosting a full day of fun for his 21^st birthday. The house was full and we had a ballin time until the A.M...ofcourse. It was great to see many of our friends and take a victory lap at our old senior year stomping grounds at 356 E. Fairmount Ave. This last stop was truly a fitting ending to the greatest adventure either of us had ever been on, PLUS it was a great way to steal one more night in State College before returning home to the “real world.”

            The next morning we woke up nice and early with a mix of emotions. We were tired from the day before and the long time rambling. We were a little sad our journey was about to come to a close. We were anxious to see our families (and our beds). But most importantly we felt accomplished for successfully completing our quest. After a traditional trip to Wendy’s with Mr. Ryan “Banana” Peel, we set off home. We listened to music and talked the whole way reflecting on the weeks past. When we finally arrived in Southampton, PA we knew it was the end. John unpacked the last of his stuff from the car and the two amigos said their goodbyes. It was a journey of epic proportions and will forever be in our hearts.

Looking back, we learned a very valuable lesson, and we'd like to share it with you:

“If you have the means and time to take a cross country trip...ABSOLUTELY DO IT!!!!!!! You’re a BIG DUMMY if you don’t. Seriously. Do it!

Lastly, we would like to thank some very special people who helped made this trip a reality, were incredibly generous hosts, put up with our absences, and/or are generally awesome components of our lives.

The Miecnikowski/Montag Family

The Leven Family

All our blog followers!!! (but only if you’re actually reading this)

Aileen Keenan

Nina in Buffalo, NY

The Benchell Family in Chicago, IL

The Long Beach Chapter of Zeta Beta Tau

John’s Aunt Meg, her roommate Sandy, and their family in Atlanta, GA

The Leven Family of Allen, TX

Brandon Greenspan

The Univ of Texas chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi

The Penn State Chapter of Zeta Beta Tau

And all of our other friends, comrades, and fellow ramblers.

THANK YOU!!!

Lord, I was born a ramblin' man
Tryin' to make a livin' and doin' the best I can
And when it's time for leavin', I hope you'll understand
That I was born a ramblin' man

-Ramblin’ Man by The Allman Brothers

Thanks to you, I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.
But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.
For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it's headed my way.
Sometimes I grow so tired, but I know I've got one thing I got to do...Ramble On!

Got no time to for spreadin' roots, The time has come to be gone.
And to' our health we drank a thousand times, it's time to...Ramble On!

-Ramble On by Led Zeppelin

Days 29-33 - Outer Banks, NC

Days 29 – 33 – Outer Banks, NC
Atlanta, GA > Southern Shores, NC

Well fans, this is the beginning of the end. After 28 days of rambling across the United States, the boys have finally reached North Carolina and 5 days of vacation with the Leven family. We rolled into our beach house to roars and cheers and had a great time telling stories of our adventures to John’s parents, grandparents, and siblings. Here's a picture of the beach house.

We spent 5 glorious days recovering from our adventure. We went to the beach, we swam in the pool, we ate until we couldn’t eat anymore, and we drank until the booze was gone. Seeing the Atlantic Ocean a mere two weeks after seeing the Pacific Ocean was quite a trip. And its not like we were in a rush either, we saw 3 national parks, spent a week in Texas, conquered New Orleans, and visited San Antonio and Atlanta during that time. What a blast!

Well folks, thanks for following us on our epic adventure. Making this trip a reality is truly one of the best decisions either of us have ever made. If you ever have the chance to do something like this... our advice to you is...FRICKIN' DO IT!!!

That said, we hope you have enjoyed following our adventures thus far. But fear not loyal fans, our adventure is not 100% complete. We will making a surprise final stop before returning to home. Tune in next time to find out where that oh-so-special spot is.

Days 26-28 - New Orleans and Atlanta

Days 26-28
Austin, TX> New Orleans, LA (2 nights)> Atlanta, GA

    After four nights in the same city, and a full week in Texas, we knew it was time to keep rambling. New Orleans was quite possibly the city with the highest expectations on the trip, and boy, did it live up to them. We arrived in New Orleans early Friday evening and set ourselves up at a hostel. We were just aching to check out Bourbon Street. Well we got out rooms, dropped off our stuff and pre-gamed a bit before hit quite possibly America’s biggest party.

After boozing up to the level required to enter such a holy mecca of alcohol consumption, we took the streetcar down to the glorious land known as the French Quarter. It was like a dream.

Bourbon street is blocked off to cars and had people holding drinks in their hands walking up and down it listening, laughing, and dancing to the live music all around. We had a rather long and fantastic evening, hit sack in our hostel with smiles on our faces.   

The next morning we awoke sometime in the early afternoon. When a hungover John was hit in the face by a rogue ceiling fan, we knew this was going to be a special day. We walked around the French Quarter, which was filled with food, bars, and just people having a great time.

We drove to Mississippi River and took it its mightyness. Next, we visited the famous above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans. These rather large graves were certainly unlike anything we were used to and they were necessary due to the high water table of New Orleans.

Once back at the hostel we set out for night two on Bourbon street, this time grabbing dinner there. We walked around had quite a night again and ended the night with some beers and some good conversation on the edge of an ominous looking Mississippi River.

 After conquering Bourbon Street and New Orleans, which we both agreed, is a must see city for anyone that’s never been, we set out for our long journey to North Carolina. We stopped for a night outside of Atlanta, GA. We were pampered with comfort and welcomes from our host Sandy, John’s Aunt’s roommate, and her family. They were AWESOME! We thank them so much for their hospitality. Then we hit the road to North Carolina.

Days 22-25 Austin and San Antonio

Days 22-25
Dallas(Allen), TX> Austin, TX for 4 days with a day in San Antonio

    So after a relaxing two days at the home of the wonderful Texas Leven House, we set off to Austin. However, before leaving the city we stopped at a Goodyear to see if the air conditioning could be fixed. As explained in the last post we attempted to fix the air conditioning by pumping more Freon into it ourselves… which backfired. So this time we sucked it up and went to a professional. Well long story short they came back with an estimate for 1400 dollars…. So we said thanks anyway and went to Austin a little astonished and still very sweaty.
    We arrived in Austin a few hours later (which happens to be in Travis county). We had contacted a friend, Brandon Greenspan, at the University of Texas, which is is right in the city of Austin. Brandon is a member of AEPi at Texas and let us stay in his room at their fraternity house. Now fraternity life is something John and Travis already know a little bit about from their days spent conquering Penn State, so they felt right at home.
    The second day was spent mostly at a local auto mechanic in Austin. We did a little research and found that this place was good and went in for a second opinion crossing our fingers that they were not going to come back with a 1400 estimate as well. A few hours later we had the estimate for 700 in hand completely understanding what was wrong and agreed to pay the price to fix it. Another couple hours later the car was fixed and the vents were blowing out air as refreshing as well…. Air conditioning in the desert. We went out that night to 6th street, which is the large strip of bars which is primarily filled with people in their young 20s and is the “happening” place in town. That was fun and because of that experience Brandon convinced us to stay a fourth night which was not the original plan.
    Day three in Austin was a great day as well. We began by driving to Salt Lick BBQ just south of Austin which is a jaw-dropping… uncontrollably salivating…. Mindnumbingly good…. ALL YOU CAN EAT… BBQ extravaganza. Well after our tummies were filled to our delight we drove another hour and a half to San Antonio. Well as some you people who have learned some US history may know San Antonio is the city built around the Alamo. So we checked out the Alamo which was a lot cooler than expected. It was pretty much an old fort building but there were many cool exhibits from the many years of the Alamo’s existence. Our loyal readers may be interested to know that famous American heroes including Davey Crocket, Jim Bowie, and William Barrett Travis dies in their efforts at the Battle of the Alamo.

After checking out this historical mecca, we walked around the San Antonio “Riverwalk” which consists of a series of trendy restaurants built along a controlled canal throughout the city. Once finished exploring the main attractions of San Antonio, we drove back to Austin and spent the night at the AEPi house.

Our last full day in Austin was spent checking out the city itself. Brandon showed us the highest point in the city, South Congress Street, and finally the Texas State Capitol.

All which were fairly interesting spots especially the capitol. Of course on our last night in the city we spent out on 6th street again and it was the best drinking night of the trip. The bars were full and we had a fantastic time. Certainly a huge thank you goes out to Brandon and all of his brothers that showed us such a fantastic time in Austin. Don't Mess With Texas!  
Hook 'Em Horns!!!

Days 20 & 21 - Allen, TX - Uncle Brian's House

Day 20 and 2
Abilene, TX> Dallas (Allen), TX

    Before continuing on with our blog we must apologize for the delay in our blog updates. It has been at least a week since our last post and it is due to a combination of technical malfunction and schedule conflicts... but really adventuring is more fun than blogging... sorry loyal fans.

To cheer you up, here is a pic of John serenading on a Hannah Montana guitar. 

    Anyway we woke up from our final night of camping in a sweat from the Texas heat. We packed up the tent and made the rest of the journey to John’s Uncle Brian’s house in Allen Texas outside of Dallas.

We got there and from the very first moment we were showed the best hospitality. John’s aunt and uncle handed us a few beers showed us to the pool and took us out to dinner. We really needed it too because we had been through national parks traveling almost everyday of the past few weeks. We stayed there that night and another one. During that time we talked, drank, and had a fantastic time with the Levens of Texas.

Really the only event besides fantastic relaxation and great conversation was an attempt at fixing the air conditioning. The most basic, probable, and by far the cheapest way to fix this was to add Freon to the car ourselves. Well... that didn’t work. We ended up exploding a can of Freon all over the lawn but hey… no one was hurt and it was kinda cool to watch. So we went back to relaxing and enjoyed the birthday get together for John’s Aunt and rested up before traveling to Austin the next day.

Day 19 - Roswell, NM and Carlsbad Caverns

Day 19
Campsite in New Mexico> Roswell, NM> Carlsbad Caverns, NM> Campsite in Abilene, TX


    We woke up slowly knowing that our driving for the day was not too bad and we really needed a little bit of relaxing the pace. So we packed up the tent had some breakfast and swam at the pool of our campsite. After a couple hours relaxing and doing our best to cool off we headed to the alien capital of the United States… Roswell, New Mexico.

We really had no idea what to expect when we arrived 2 hours later, but we got there and began to explore. Apparently we missed the big annual alien convention by one week, but it didn’t matter to us. We looked around a few stores, had a pretty good burger at a local bar and grill, enjoyed an alien wheat beer and checked out the Roswell Alien museum and research center.

The museum was interesting, a bunch of stories and all of the evidence relating to the incident in Roswell. To sum up the incident as the museum told it: A farmer went to check out a crash far out on his farm and couldn’t identify the material he found, he also found some “bodies” which were not human and not animals. Now at first glance you just think this man is nuts but what gets interesting is that the next day neither the farmer or anyone in town could get to the crash site because there was a huge amount of government agents blocking off the area. A day or two later after claiming that he found an alien spacecraft and alien bodies the government said that it was a crashed weather balloon and there are many testimonials saying that the government agents really threatened anyone who wanted to talk about what they saw. After seeing hundreds of the documents it does start to get a little interesting  but with no pictures and no real proof we both agreed that although something may have happened we don’t believe it was aliens.

    Once out of Roswell we set our GPS for Carlsbad Caverns National Park about an hour and a half away. When we got there around 630 we found out that you couldn’t enter the caverns after 4pm. However, there was a bat flight with hundreds of thousands of bats leaving the caves at 7:45. So we stuck around and watched the bat flight. It was truly amazing and made the trip to Carlsbad worth it even though we didn’t see the caverns. The bats came out of this cave at rapid speeds and as the left the cave they created almost this tornado of bats as the flew out into the distance. The flight lasted at least 30mins so you can imagine at hundreds of bats every few seconds what it looked like. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take any pictures so if you want to see it you’re just going to have to go yourself. Well finally with the sun setting we decided it was time to look for campsites.

We realized that unlike the more wooded areas of the country that we had been to before this area seemed to seriously lack in anywhere we could pitch a tent. So we decided to suck it up, get some coffee and drive 4 hours into Texas and arrived in Abilene, Texas. After a very long hot day we crashed hard in the tent. But we slept with smiles on our faces as we knew the next two days would be spent at John’s Uncle Brian’s house outside of Dallas Texas, now only a few hours away.

Day 18 - White Sands National Monument

Day 18

Campsite in Benson, AZ>  White Sands National Monument, NM> Campsite in New Mexico

            So yet another day of driving through the deserts of the United States began.. without A/c I might add. We left the campsite in Arizona setting forth on our drive to White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. The drive was going to be a rather long one so we got our game faces on and headed east through the hottest and driest parts of America. We arrived at White Sands around 5 pm. We had noticed and learned that this area was where they have some much of the major missile testing for the U.S. army…. That doesn’t effect anything we did but it was rather interesting to drive past big army bases in the middle of no where. Anyway, once we arrived at White Sands…. A very special section of desert within a much larger desert we were very excited to get out of the car and into the air-conditioned visitor center. 

We learned that White Sands is made up of Gypsum which has been weathered away into sand and has become an 8 mile long section of pure white sand dunes. This sand is not only very white but it is perpetually cool and thus much easier to walk around on. Well, one of the more popular things to do in White Sands National monument is sledding. Yes… sledding in the desert.

We bought a circle sled and headed for the dunes. We had some fun sliding down the hills for a while, but what was really cool was the sunset and the beginning of night.

The sunset was amazing and the colors were incredible. However, once the moon came up.. and we were fortunate enough to arrive on the night of a full moon…. It was like day time. The light of the moon reflected off of the white sand and light up the ground. We had full shadows at night and it really looked like we were on the surface of the moon. Well the park closed at 10 and they kicked us our, but it was an amazing experience and by far one of the coolest stops on our raodtrip so far. We packed up and found another campsite in New Mexico not to far away. It was a long day of driving and we needed some good rest.