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Adam-12 Memories: One Lunchbox, Two Legends
Some road trip stories take a while to come together. This one took 23 years—and 820 miles in a single day. A 400-Mile Mission It started early—around 6 a.m.—with a road trip to Pittsburgh and the Steel City Con. The goal? Simple: get Kent McCord to sign a childhood Adam-12 lunchbox. But this wasn’t just another autograph stop. This was finishing something that started more than two decades ago. Back to First Grade The lunchbox goes all the way back to 1974. First grade. Heather Hills. Packed with PB&J, a thermos of tomato soup, and whatever made it through the day. And on the front? Adam-12. At the time, it wasn’t nostalgia.…
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What’s Not to Love? The Next Chapter in Our Margaritaville Road Trip Story
Prelude Back in November and December 2024, we started talking with Alan & Carie about another visit to Latitude Margaritaville. It didn’t take long before the plans came together—April 20–25, 2025. As always, the destination was part of the excitement… but the journey getting there was just as important. Saturday, April 19, 2025 – Hitting the Road We kicked off the trip the right way—with a stop at one of our favorite local spots, Java Station 31. Coffee in hand, we headed south, picking up I-65 to I-265, then I-64 through Lexington before connecting to I-75. A must-stop along the way was Buc-ee’s in Richmond, Kentucky. It’s hard to pass…
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The Trip That Started It All: Car Camping to Margaritaville (October 2023)
Before Margaritaville became something more to us… before the return trips, the music, and everything that followed… there was just one visit. At the time, it felt simple. A road trip to visit friends. 🏁 It Started at Indy 500 Weekend In May of 2022, during our annual Indy 500 weekend camp at our home in Speedway, Indiana, our good friends Alan and Carie shared some big news. They had sold their home in Ohio. They were living in their Airstream. And they were building a new home in Latitude Margaritaville in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. At the time, it sounded exciting… but also a little hard to picture.…
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June 13-21, 2020: South Dakota
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I’ve Been Everywhere…well, not yet, but working on it!
Of course, I haven’t been everywhere, and it would be impossible to literally go everywhere in your lifetime. But let’s narrow “everywhere” down to those places listed in the Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” I love that song, and it’s fun to play on road trips! [youtube=https://youtu.be/ov4epAJRPMw] “I’ve Been Everywhere” was originally written by Geoff Mack about Australian towns, and was later adapted by him for release in North America, by changing the locations to those in the United States and Canada, with some exceptions in Central and South America (Tocopilla, Chile; Costa Rica; Argentina; Barranquilla and Padilla, Colombia; Salvador and Diamantina, Brazil). As I listened to the song…
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Birthplace of Route 66 Festival – Day 4: August 16, 2015
Not too much to say about today, really. We started the journey home early, broke down camp, packed up the trailer, and hauled it east to Indy all day. No festival attendance for us today, since yesterday was our big day. We took Route 66 most of the way out, but eventually had to take the Evil I home. Still, we did stop at the Route 66 Rest Area and Visitor’s Center, which is a great place to pick up information not just on Missouri, but on Route 66 as well. The rest area is very much Route 66-themed. Here are a few examples; see the gallery below for more.…
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The Road Trip That Made Me
Sometimes I sit and wonder when I became addicted to road trips and all of the memories they create. Growing up, we frequently vacationed in northern Minnesota and drove some 800 miles each way from Indianapolis to our destination, which was a cabin at a resort on one of 10,000 lakes. But I think I can point to a trip 30 years ago in July of 1985 that really opened my eyes to what a road trip vacation is all about. It was July 4th weekend of 1985 when my mom, dad, and I loaded up in my folks’ 1977 Chevrolet Impala. I was getting ready to head into my…
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My Cannonball Fugitive – A Trip 8 Years in the Making
For those couple of you who follow my blog, we sometimes incorporate photographing movie filming locations into our road trips. We first researched the filming locations for My Cousin Vinny in the fall of 2008. We had decided (as we regularly do), that it was a great movie to watch for some laughs. But of course, instead of watching the movie like normal people, on this evening, our curiosity was piqued and we ended up breaking out the laptops to start researching filming locations and continually pausing the movie. At the time, there wasn’t alot of info on the Internet, but we did have satellite images and maps available, as well as the…
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July 6, 2014: Amarillo, Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico
Today’s Map Below is an interactive map of our trip, tracked using my Trimble Outdoors Navigator iPhone app. Feel free to browse and refer to the map for details about where we traveled, the photos were taken, etc. You can zoom in, or click the link below for a bigger, fullscreen map. We got started from our hotel in Amarillo and headed over to Route 66. First, we spotted this now-closed shop called Spudnuts Coffee and Donuts. My grandson got a huge laugh out of “Spudnuts,” so for quite a while he amused himself by repeating “Spudnuts”…over and over and over…we felt alot like Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man, as Raymond repeated…
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Plans change; relax and go with the flow…
Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans…OK, we didn’t really have an actual trip plan yet; just a general declaration that we were going to go west instead of east this year, and our destination would be South Dakota, and we’d travel in September. We’re still heading west, only now we’ve bumped up the trip to July! After talking it over, Pat and I decided that since I was planning on taking two weeks off work to watch our grandson, we might as well just take him on a road trip, rather than me just using two weeks off to stay home. Pat only has a…