In the beginning.

I guess it all started in 2003.  My uncle offered up his VW bus, which he had purchased new in 1968 and had been the only owner.  My co-worker, Ken, insisted that I take my uncle up on the offer, and committed to make the drive from San Francisco, where the bus had spent it's entire life, back to Chicago with me.  Ken had also received a 1968 VW from the original owner, his uncle, just a few years earlier.  His VW was a bug and Ken was in the process of restoring it, so he was pretty stoked about keeping my uncle's bus in the family and restoring it to its former glory.

Ken finally convinced me that I needed an air cooled VW in my life, so I called my uncle and told him I would love to have the bus.  Like the opportunistic people we were, Ken and I signed up for a training course in Santa Clara and flew out to San Francisco on one-way tickets.  We wanted to bring along our friend and co-worker Mark, a total gear head, thinking that the probability of something breaking was, well, 1:1, and would be great to have someone around that could actually fix things.  Unfortunately, our E-commerce employer wasn't keen on the entire network engineering team driving through Nevada in a 35 year old car with no cell or pager service.  So, we went with 2.

We needed to be back in Chicago by Saturday night (which is a story for another day).  Over lunch on Tuesday, we did the math.  ~2200 miles, top speed of 60 mph (excluding hills!) = 36 hours of driving.  With only 4 days to complete the journey, there was little margin for error.  So we left San Francisco Tuesday night after dinner in the Castro, gaining a few hours head start and missing the morning rush hour traffic.  The San Francisco -> Chicago trip became more of an exercise in "getting it done" than a relaxing cross county excursion, but it served as an appetizer for better things to come.  Before this trip I never had dreams of cross county travel; the road was always a medium to getting to the next destination.  But the original destination became the genesis of our trip this year.

We have been in the planning phase for about two years now, at least in the general sense.  But with actual dates and reservations in hand, the trip is real.