Planning an adventure

Vonda’s Views
March 7, 2010

I love a good adventure story and now I am about to write one of my own.
I have been planning a Spring Break trip for the two high schoolers in my house. We started talking about this back in the Fall after our exchange student Anna arrived to live with us. Anna was trying to grasp the concept of just how big the United States is and we thought that it would be a great idea to take a cross country trip and see as much of the USA as possible in a short period of time. I started researching and came up with the idea of traveling by train or bus. There is nothing like letting someone else doing the driving and navigating while all I do is sit and watch the landscapes and cities go by.

We decided on Chicago and Los Angeles as our destinations; Chicago just long enough to go up in the Sears tower and then on to Los Angeles to see the Pacific Ocean and other points of interest. After contacting friends in the LA area and making arrangements for a place to stay then the fun began; how much money or how little can we make this trip for and just how are we going to get there?

While I really wanted to travel by train, the schedules just were not going to cooperate with us. I want to go out there one route and return on another so that we can travel through as many states as possible. While traveling by train is surprisingly very cost efficient, some routes are only traveled 3 days a week and as luck would have it, it was not the 3 days we needed. So the Greyhound Bus has become our mode of travel.

The girls have been researching all of the ‘free’ things that we can do while we are out there. There is the La Brea Tar Pits at Hancock Park and the Hollywood Star Walk of Fame; Graumans Chinese Theater and all of the Hand and Foot prints of the stars is nearby as is the Hollywood Sign and Griffith Observatory in Griffith Park. I would love to be able to look through that huge telescope into the cosmos! There are many other things that we want to do that will cost money. There is Disneyland and we can’t pass up going to the original Disney theme park. I want to go to the Pacific at Hermosa Beach which is where we lived in 1959 before my Daddy decided to move back to Mississippi.

Anna is from Armenia so we are going to go to visit the area of Los Angeles known as Little Armenia and my friends tell me there are many wonderful Armenian restaurants there so I will finally get to eat some Armenian food. We have found it amusing that Los Angeles has more Armenians living there than do in her native land.

I am busily trying to plan something on paper so we can cram as much as possible into every day as we will only have 4 days to see and do as much as we can On the way out there we will have meal stops in St. Louis and Denver and Las Vegas and then on the trip back we will have meal times in Phoenix and El Paso and Dallas before finally getting to Memphis. Its going to be a long ride but we will travel through 12 states seeing everything from the Plains to the mountains to the deserts and a little of everything else in between. I will be journaling the whole time and taking pictures.

I love adventures and taking a bus trip with a couple of teenage girls to LA so we can say we wet our toes in the Pacific should be a good one.