1977

If you prefer to look at individual photos you may do that at PHOTOS

In 1977, I (Jerry) attended a meeting in San Jose, California. We took this opportunity to camp cross country. In preparation for the trip we bought a used pop-up trailer. We pulled this with a station wagon. In those days before mandatory sear belts, we put a green covered mattress in the back of the station wagon and our children (ages 6, 9 and 11) rode back there. The camper had small wheels that caused various problems on the trip because the tires overheated. In Tennessee, a tire lost its tread and we had to detour to Little Rock to buy another one. In Sequoia we had a flat and I think I must have done a bad job remounting the tire because coming down the freeway to San Jose, the wheel came off and the camper landed with a thud on the highway. We were towed to San Jose. While I was at my meeting the camper was repaired and the rest of the family went to San Francisco to stay with Judy's Aunt Sarah. But that is a story in itself. The trip home was difficult because I had become paranoid about the camper and stopped in every camper repair facility along the way to check that it was okay. On the last day of the trip we started from the Indiana Dunes, stopped at the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio and then crossed into Pennsylvania about 6 PM on Interstate 80. Any sane person would have stopped for the night but by this time I had lost all elements of sanity. "We are in Pennsylvania, let's go home!" We got home at 3 AM.

A map of our trip can be seen by clicking here. Google Maps only allows for ten destinations so this is a number of Google maps pasted together. It is a pretty good approximation to our trip but, of course, leaves out a number of side trips. Creating these slide shows from 38 year old film negatives was an interesting, albeit time consuming, experience. The films were for the most part scanned by ScanCafe but I realized that some were not scanned for various reasons and I had to scan those. All the photos need to be edited in some way or another. For some, this was just normal processing (e.g., cropping). For others the colors had faded and needed to be restored. Finally, think about what your reaction would be if someone dropped 200 photos in front of you and asked you to put them in the order of a trip you took 38 years ago. This was a bit easier since I had the original negatives and within each roll there was an ordering but still I had to try and figure out where the pictures were taken. (No GPS information on negatives) Google was a great help with there are many photos on the web for most tourist sites. (Yosemite and Yellowstone were easy. Montezuma Castle and Guadalupe were more difficult.)

Over the years, we have traveled to almost seventy different countries on six continents. Looking at these photos I am once again reminded that there are few places in the world that are more scenic than the American Southwest and West. Although we have made five or maybe more trips to this area, I am always eager to revisit it. The Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone are in everyone's top ten list but places like Canyon de Chelly and the South Dakota Badlands are equally awesome and far less crowded. I hope you enjoy these slide shows.

Part 1 - Palo Duro Canyon to Zion National Park