Preparing for a Road Trip

Ford, Sevierville, TN

One of my favorite activities is travel, specifically taking a road trip.  Seeing America by secondary or back roads, to me, is an amazing experience.  The road trip might be short or long.  It really doesn't matter.  It is about getting out there, exploring and surprising yourself with almost every turn.  With gasoline prices as high as they are, it is a bit more expensive, but worth it.

In a few weeks, one of my best friends and I will be traveling from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and back by car.  When we leave the east coast, we will be heading to Chicago to pick up the northern terminus of old U.S. Route 66.  Known as the "Mother Road," Route 66 was the main travel route between Chicago and southern California until the interstate highway system supplanted it.  There is so much written about Route 66, that I will leave it at that.  If your interested, you can find information everywhere about this historic highway.

If you are an enthusiast photographer, or just want to record your road trip for good memories, how does one prepare?  Before you even leave, how do you go about ensuring you have everything you need to successfully find, create and bring back the images that may be the only tangible items of a once-in-a-lifetime trip?  How do you avoid disaster or disappointment?  The answer, of course, is preparation.  Let me tell you three quick stories of photographic disappointment, stress, scrambling and in two of the cases, a good outcome.

1n 1972, the summer between my junior and senior years in college, my father was generous enough to pay for me to spend most of the summer in Wyoming studying Rocky Mountain field geology and field biology.  I have a B.S. in geology (of all things considering my career) and I had never been west of Michigan before that time.  I was attending a small college outside of Cleveland and that is where I would catch my ride to Wyoming.  My cousin dropped me off and five of us students were on the way, via Chevy van, to Powell, Wyoming for 8 or so weeks.

About halfway there, I realized I had left my camera in the back seat of my cousin's car.  There was nothing I could do about it.  I was helpless.  No cell phones, no email, no texting in 1972.  When we arrived in Powell, I called my dad and asked him to mail the camera to me, which he did immediately.  I was so relieved when it arrived as the Rockies were the most amazing landscapes I had ever seen.  I had fallen in love with the Rockies and planned to take more photographs than I could afford.  But I may never get back there and that place was Amazing, with a capital A!  But...  When I tried to use my camera, it was broken!  What!  What happened?  Long story, short--my younger sister had gotten ahold of it and jammed it.  Ahhhh!

I asked someone to drive me to downtown Cody, WY and I dropped it off at a camera shop to be repaired.  The sad ending is I was back home in Pennsylvania when I finally took delivery on the fixed camera.  Not one photograph of Wyoming, the Rockies, Yellowstone, the Tetons, Cody, the Bighorn Mountains, Montana, anywhere.  Lesson:  think, take precautions not to forget anything.


Dodge, Sevierville, TN

Story #2.  A few years ago, my wife and I took a 13-day cruise/tour to Alaska.  I prepared my photographic equipment relentlessly.  Part of my routine to back up my daily photographs was to upload the images from the camera's memory card and put them onto a small, travel laptop.  I then would keep the card separate to retain two copies of images.  I would then insert a new card into the camera.  The first night, when ready to insert a new card, guess what?  No cards?  After all my extensive preparation for the trip, I had forgotten my extra memory cards.  Panic!  I asked the hotel personnel if they would drive me to a Wal-Mart and they agreed, but I found only 1 compact flash card in the Wal-Mart in Fairbanks, Alaska.  The card was not a high capacity card, but it was a card.  Plan B.

I bought the card and luckily, in my contingency plan I bought and brought a small external hard drive.  My new plan was to back up my daily images to the laptop and the external hard drive, reformat the card, and use it again the next day.  The Wal-Mart card would be used if the primary card failed.  Luckily, all worked out.  Lesson:  Think, take precautions not to forget anything.

Short story #3.  Last fall, my wife and I took a 6000 mile, 18 state, 21 day road trip out to the Tetons, Yellowstone, Devil's Tower, the Black Hills, the Badlands, etc.  Again, I prepared relentlessly for the trip, making sure I didn't forget anything.  At the last moment I decided to use a different camera bag as my primary bag for my large DSLR equipment than the one I had been planning to use.  At the last, last minute, I decided to change back to "old faithful," a bag I have had since the mid-70s (Domke canvas bag if you want to know.)  Everything was going well until I wanted to use my big, heavy Nikon 70-200mm F/2.8 G AF-S VRII lens in Grand Teton National Park.  The 70-200 is not a lens I normally handhold in order to ensure I get the quality that satisfies me.  When I went to mount it on my tripod--no mounting foot for the lens!  I searched everywhere and it just wasn't anywhere.  After scouring my brain, the only place it could possibly be was in the "other" bag that I switched everything to before I switched back.  I called my daughter, she checked and found it in a side pocket (how in the world did I miss it?) and she agree to Fed-Ex it overnight to me at our hotel in Jackson, WY.  It all worked out, but the episode was really avoidable.  Lesson:  Think and think again and don't change anything at the last minute.

All in all, in 44 years, those are the only episodes I can remember when I forgot something important.  Two of them worked out, but the third didn't, unfortunately.  I'll take that record.  I'm pretty fastidious and obsessive about planning. 

A interesting note:  as I mentioned in a previous post, I still have that camera that was broken in Wyoming in 1972, my Minolta SR-T101, so I took it with me to make some images in Yellowstone last fall, just to bring things full circle!

Tomorrow, I will talk a little bit about my preparation for this exciting, upcoming road trip on Route 66.

If you haven't had an opportunity to visit my photography website, please do at www.dennismook.com.  I think you may see something interesting.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook