Article was previously posted to ChaskaHerald.com on August 18, 2022.

Road-tripping has made quite the resurgence in recent years, with traveling by car providing the safest way to vacation with the ever-present pandemic. Even as national gas prices average around $4/gallon, travelers have not been deterred — including me.

Around the Fourth of July weekend, I ventured out to Salt Lake City, Utah, to visit some college friends. At the time of this trip, gas averaged around $4.63/gallon. On day one of my road trip, I left with my car packed, miniature dachshund in the passenger seat and a full tank of gas in my 2021 Ford Escape — a vehicle that gets around 30 miles per gallon.

There are surely other ways I could have trekked out to the Beehive State, but I truly enjoy road-tripping! I like hiking when I can. It’s an easy mode of transportation with my dog, it makes for some great photo opportunities and I get to travel on my own terms.

THE ROUTE

The first overnight stay of my trip was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota — a common destination for road-trippers who are gliding along I-90.

For the road-tripper with a tiny dog and an even tinier bladder, scoping out decent rest stops is a must. On this trip, I came across the best one I have ever been to in Chamberlain, South Dakota. The stop features clean bathrooms, great views, and the Dignity Statue — a 50-foot-tall, stainless steel statue of an Indigenous woman that honors South Dakota’s Lakota and Dakota people.

After spending the night in Sioux Falls, my next destination was Casper, Wyoming. With a population of about 60,000, it’s a little less than half the size of Sioux Falls. In driving through, it’s evident that this is a common rest stop for weary travelers as the roads are lined with hotels and a small assortment of fast-food restaurants.

Throughout Wyoming, and later Montana, I ran into little bouts of rain, which my buggy windshield certainly appreciated. One of the things I like most about moving further out West is that you can always tell when it’s going to rain. The sky seems so much bigger when there are fewer trees to obstruct your view, making it easy to pinpoint when a dark cloud rolls in.

After Casper, I reached Salt Lake City, where I spent a few days catching up with friends and taking in the mountain views.

DON’T SETTLE FOR BAD VIEWS

https://307524a4532ee574e981b1db9972106c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

When leaving Salt Lake City, Google Maps will tell you that the fastest way to get back to the Twin Cities is to drive through Wyoming and South Dakota (AKA, the way I drove in); or if I wanted to tack on an extra 30 minutes or so, I could have driven through Nebraska and Iowa.

As tempting as the prospect of looking at flat farmland for 18-19 hours is, I opted to take a more northern and scenic route through Montana and North Dakota. Even though it ended up being about 22 total hours of driving to get home this way, I got to experience two states I had never visited.

My couple of days in Montana ended up providing some of the best views and photos for the memory books.

As I made my way through North Dakota, I ended up driving shorter distances to accommodate my work schedule and inevitable exhaustion from the busy days. I ended up spending a night in Dickinson and one in Fargo before making my final four-hour trek back to the Twin Cities.

While some may avoid smaller towns like Dickinson and opt for larger cities when road-tripping, I find stops in towns like this to be quite peaceful. Slightly smaller towns provide cheaper overnight options and a more truthful experience. While they may not have the glitz and glamor of larger towns like Bismarck or Fargo, they certainly have a charm worth stopping for.

When I arrived home, I calculated that I had driven a total of 2,715.6 miles over the nine days. If I hadn’t opted to take a more scenic way home through Montana, I could have saved myself some driving cramps and extra miles on my car — but where’s the fun in that?

GAS PRICES

I knew that as I drove out west, gas would gradually get more expensive. Over my nine days away, I spent $430.05 on gas over seven stops in total. Meaning that each stop cost me an average of $61.44/gallon.

• Hartford, South Dakota: $4.599/gallon
• Wall, South Dakota: $4.799/gallon
• Rawlins, Wyoming: $4.949/gallon
• Chubbuck, Idaho: $5.399/gallon
• Livingston, Montana: $4.899/gallon
• Glendive, Montana: $4.629/gallon
• Jamestown, North Dakota: $4.499/gallon

Road-tripping isn’t necessarily the cheapest and best time-saving option, but worth it for a myriad of reasons beyond the monetary.

Two years ago I was wrapping up my junior year of college and the article I was writing from my time in Phuket, Thailand covering wildlife tourism. 

Led by one faculty and staff member, I, along with 9 other students embarked on a 3 week long reporting excursion to uncover the truth about environmentally focused topics. Many students go on short term study abroad excursions because it’s a fun chance to travel with their friends. For us, it was drilled in from the start that this was a work trip. 

We were reporters going to cover meaningful topics. From talking to folks getting kicked out of their historical village site along sparkling beaches by property developers… 

Or analyzing the impact of legal and illegal wildlife tourism… 

We had a job to do and we took it seriously, student journalists or not.

After a long day, the views certainly did ease my reeling mind from the heavy interviews conducted however.

And I found myself taking more time to appreciate the the cats lounging around the temples we visited at the end of our trip.

While in Bangkok, on the final leg of the trip, we started to get news notifications that this ominous, fast-spreading virus was starting to show up around the world. We were given N95 masks to wear while visiting the tourist heavy Grand Palace in Bangkok—this was also in part due to the high density of people in one area as well as the high pollution levels that day.

Little did any of us know that shortly after returning from this trip, the pandemic would intensify to a point where our university would be shut down, the people we saw every day would scatter off to their hometowns, and the world was simply… different now.