By: Samie

Travel Dates: July 2015

Drive day stretch one

(South Dakota to Wisconsin)

In case you don’t know me or haven’t gathered from previous posts, I really love travel and adventure! I adore visiting new places, experiencing new adventures, and sampling new foods. However, something you may not know is that was not always the case.

The truth is, for the first approximately 20 years of my life, I had done very little traveling and held minimal interest in the idea of it. There were ocassional road trips here and there, but they expanded to areas nearby like Minnesota or Iowa.

A very young me made her way down to Arkansas, but I cannot recall this adventure whatsoever. My very first time on an airplane wasn’t even until the 8th grade, when I was able to participate in a school trip to Washington D.C. and New York City. Even that wasn’t quite the travel bug that bit me.

That passion and fire wasn’t lit within me until a couple trips in 2015. One was a spring break road trip with some friends down to Texas. The other, the one I’m going to be writing about here, was when I accompanied my mother, stepbrother Tyson, and sister Rebekah on a road trip to the “Tar Heel” state of North Carolina.

One July morning, we hit the road at sunrise. Now, Charlotte, North Carolina, our end destination for this drive, is about a 21 hour drive from where we were living at the time, Watertown, South Dakota. With Rebekah only being 3 and 1/2 at the time, doing that stretch all in one go wasn’t really an option. Instead, we broke the initial drive into three legs. The first of which would take us from Watertown to Madison, Wisconsin, a more manageable 7 and 1/2 hour drive instead.

This means that even leaving bright and early, we wouldn’t arrive at our hotel in Wisconsin until late afternoon or early evening, after included bathroom stops and food breaks. My mom kicked off the first shift of driving. Obviously, neither Tyson nor Rebekah would be taking a turn for obvious reasons, so driving shifts would be on a rotation between her and I, a drivers license-having 20-year-old.

Because this first day was simply a driving day, there won’t be a lot of meat to kick us off in this post, but hopefully you, like all of us in my mom’s minivan in 2015, will stick along for the journey.

Each of us not in the driver’s seat had our own way of enjoying the long stretches of road. I enjoyed mine by taking pictures and enjoying the passing scenery, Tyson enjoyed his by being goofy and weird at all possible opportunities, and Rebekah enjoyed hers by sleeping in positions that would render me utterly immovable for at least a week if I were to attempt them currently.

With the route we took, the very first state we crossed into was Minnesota. The was also our first great photo opportunity, and we took it with arms wide open! We made our stops along the way in a few Minnesota cities and exits.

We then hopped back in, refreshed and refueled, and enjoyed a relaxing and uneventful final stretch of day one.

We enjoyed walking around the area at our hotel, surrounded by stunning wildflowers before tucking in for the night. We had another good 7 hours of driving ahead the next day was we made our way just across the border of Kentucky for the next travel day. Fortunately, we had a little more fun sightseeing and side quests along the way! But you’ll have to stay tuned to hear more!