Launch day

First officer's log
Supplementary

Captain Amanda has done an excellent job launching Road Trek, a blog dedicated to chronicling our summer 2014 vacation. We know not everyone is on Facebook, and even those of you that are may not check it every day. Instead of having our blog fall off the front page, we wanted to have something that was at least semi-cohesive that we could refer back to, and invite our friends to read. Thus the blog was born.

We went through a series of names, including:

• I know what you did last summer (would only work if we were blogging about a previous year)
• Journey to the West (doesn't work so well because we started in the west)
• Journey to the Midwest (until one of my colleagues informed me that "the west" is everything west of Colorado)
• Road Trek: The undiscovered country (we didn't think of it in time)

Our first day began with a vertical voyage in a hot air balloon, which you can read about here. We arrived in Perris, California in time to take off by the dawn's early light.

An American in Perris

Balloon on the ground

 After a short rest, and packing the car for the remainder of our journey, we made the 6 hours journey up to Elk Grove to stay with Amanda's family. We will pick up Amanda's brother, Zach, who will be joining us for the remainder of this journey.

Next stop: Crescent city and the Redwoods [July 5th]