road trip preparations

So, what do you do before you move across the ocean to another continent? You go see as much as you can on the continent you're in right now?! At least that's what we'll do. Our big road trip will take us to the Chicago airport first, to pick up a friend, who comes over from Germany to join us. After she arrives on July 31st we'll load the car with all our gear and head out west as far as we can get (the goal is to get into Colorado). The next 2 days we'll spend in Rocky Mountain National Park before we had down to Utah, where we'll spend three nights in Arches National Park, also visiting Canyonlands. The weekend we are going to spend with Joel's friends from grad school in Salt Lake City. After a shower we'll head further north to the Grand Tetons (1 night) and Yellowstone (3 nights), before we go back east with a over-night stop near Rapid City.

Preparations are going pretty well so far. We got almost all our gear together, booked all but one of the campsites back in March and are now concentrating on the food. We borrowed a food dehydrator from friends and we are dehydrating all our dinners. It's awesome!!! Since Sandra, who joins us is a vegetarian it was a bit challenging to come up with recipes but we do a mix of stuff we had and stuff that's new to us. Hey, we're scientist and what better experiments can you do?! You're curious now what's on the menu? Here you go: there'll be spaghettis with mango bell pepper sauce (twice), risotto with vegetables (twice), lentil stew with rice (that's dehydrating right now), penne with tomato sauce, black bean burgers with bread, red bean burgers with potatoes, butternut squash curry with rice and green bell pepper cottage cheese curry with couscous. We also made our own fruit roll-ups: apple-raspberry (awesome, you should try), apple-cherry (pretty good, a little sticky) and banana-pineapple (maybe not the best idea, I've ever had).

I am soooooo looking forward to the trip!!!

Jessi :)