The Expedition of Callister and Callister

I had the awesome opportunity to accompany my older brother Josh on a road trip of biblical proportions this last week. He is starting his own business (Great Basin Asphault) and had just bought a tank online. He got a great deal on it and it even came with a trailer, pretty sweet except it's all in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was going to be starting my summer job this next week and was therefore available to come along if he needed me, so we made the trip!

The first day we pretty much drove straight to Des Moines with a few stops for gas. We passed some legendary smells in Nebraska that were well off of the funkometer. We were both impressed with how many deer and turkey we were seeing all over the place. Probably around 150 turkeys in all. We spent each night in the truck at rest stops crouched into a fetal position. That was really uncomfortable at first, but after a few nights it wasn't so bad.

Day two was spent driving to the farthest point away from home on our trip. We continued through Iowa and Illinois, then we decided it would be cool to continue on to Michigan via Indiana (which was really only another 40 miles or so) and we'd get to see some nice lake Michigan scenery. Lake Michigan was huge. After that we drove back through Chicago on our way to Milwaukee. We were expecting to fly through Chicago before traffic got bad, but little did we know what was in store for us. I was driving (if you can call it that, it was more like parking) when we stopped south of Chicago. The traffic was soooo bad it took us about 2 hours to move 10 miles or so through town, but we saw the city in all of its glory, we were both blown away, it was so big! From there it was a quick hop to Milwaukee and we met up with the guy who was selling josh the tank. He was nice, but he totally wasn't prepared and we spent 7 hours trying to load that huge thing onto the trailer so we could get it out of there. Once it was loaded up we had to buy lights for the trailer so we wouldn't get pulled over. We were lucky to get into a walmart after they closed and we got the lights. While we were installing them we were visited by 3 policemen who had been called about suspicious activity (it was about 2am). They questioned us and told us to leave asap, so we finished up and left.



Day three we were still pretty nervous about the trailer and decided to take I-80 home instead of I-90 like we had talked about. By the time we reached the Iowa Nebraska border we had enough confidence in the trailer to try I-90 after all. We drove north up to Souix Falls, South Dakota and took a quick jaunt to Minnesota. We travelled clear across South Dakota and we were both really impressed with how pretty it was. We spent the night just outside of Rapid City.

Our last day started with a trip to Mt. Rushmore. Neither of us had ever seen it and it was pretty cool, though kind of smaller than I would have thought. The highlight of that detour was actually not Mt. Rushmore, it was Custer State Park. It was all these really pretty rolling, pine-forested hills and rocky crags with all kinds of wildlife. We saw deer, antelope and even 2 bighorn sheep! We were the only car on the whole road for most of our tour and got to get out a time or two and explore. It was really pretty and we both loved it. We entered Wyoming and decided to see Devil's Tower. Its the cool rock tower from the movie Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind and also the nations first national monument. It was a total whiteout blizzard and we were pretty sure we wouldn't be able to see anything, but we got there just as it cleared up a bit. One crazy coincidence is that the odometer on Josh's truck turned over to 66,666 right as we got to Devil's Tower. CRAZY!! we took a picture, of course. The rest of the drive was long and blizzard conditions. It was pretty awful, but we pulled into Kaysville at about midnight.




When all was said and done we had passed through 10 different states and travelled over 3,300 miles! It was an awesome and memorable experience that I'm sure we'll be talking about for the rest of our lives. Thanks again Josh for having me along, that was a blast!