As we drove north to pick up I-80 outside Cheyenne today, we finally returned to a familiar roadbed after many days on I-70 (which we had only driven on once before, and then only much farther east). But we couldn’t quite remember how familiar I-80 was. So we began counting it up, and eventually ran up a tally of most of our long roadtrips.
This is what we could remember:
1997
- Minneapolis to PDX via 35, 80 & 84; PDX to MPLS via 90 & 94.
1998
- MPLS to NYC via 90/80, down from upstate NY.
1999
- Scotland: counter-clockwise, starting and ending in Glasgow.
2000
- Feb: MPLS to PDX (but we may have flown, not driven).
- Aug: MPLS to Charlottesville, VA.
- Sep: MPLS to Winnepeg.
2003
- June & August: MPLS to Salt Lake City and back, twice.
- Sep: MPLS to Santa Fe, NM
2004
- Jan: Santa Fe to Phoenix, to LA, to San Francisco, then back to Santa Fe.
- March: Santa Fe to MPLS and back.
- May: Santa Fe to Naples, FL.
- June: Naples to MPLS, then MPLS to SLC.
- Aug: SLC to MPLS.
- Sep: MPLS to Upstate NY & NYC.
Those roadtrips in the 18 months between June 2003 and September 2004 totalled just under 19,000 miles. That’s an average of 1,000 miles per month . . . And this is the sixth time we’ve driven on I-80 between Cheyenne & Salt Lake City.