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The
Road Trippers
By Ashley Gurbal
Photos by Jason Kambitsis
(The following
article did not make it into the print version of IUP Magazine,
but is printed here as a Web Exclusive.)
 rom Pennsylvania to the Redwood Forest
and back again, four IUP students and a friend spent Spring Break
driving nearly 8,000 miles around the U.S. with one goal in mind: to see
and experience as much of the country as possible.
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Jason Kambitsis, Nicholas Karas, and James
Baginski, all IUP senior Geography majors at IUP, William Carmella, IUP
senior Political Science/Accounting major, and Joe Kinter, a senior
Economics major at Penn State, got the idea for the trip when they were
tacking up a map of Europe. The map showed the itinerary of a trip
Karas, Kinter, and Kambitsis took during last year’s spring break.
“We were looking at the map and thought,
‘Let’s do the same thing here,’” said Karas.
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Left to right: Jason Kambitsis, Nick Karas, Joe Kinter, James Baginski,
William Carmella |
“Everybody told us before we went, ‘You
will not make it. This can’t happen, and it won’t happen,’” Karas said.
“The only support we had was [Geography professor] Kevin Patrick, who
said, ‘This trip can’t be done, but the five of you can make it.’”
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Sampling boiled
crawfish |
“I know how they travel,” Patrick said.
“I’ve heard of their trips before. Some of them have driven to
Philadelphia and back in one night for a cheese steak. ... With that in
mind, and knowing the way they pound the pavement, I knew they could do
it.”
Leaving Indiana on the night of March 3,
in a car borrowed from a family member, the five set off for Knoxville,
Tenn., to see the Sunsphere that had been the centerpiece of the 1982
World’s Fair. They arrived about 4 a.m. on March 4, located the
landmark, and continued south to New Orleans.
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Taking back roads in order to see as much
as possible, the group reached New Orleans. Around 1 the next morning,
they headed west to Texas.
Detouring through Oklahoma, they arrived
March 6 at Santa Fe, N.M. They drove through several national parks and
eventually on to one of the few must-see destinations they’d previously
identified—the Grand Canyon.
From the Grand Canyon, they continued on
to Las Vegas, where they engaged in “eating, gambling, and losing
money.” After a stop in Death Valley, they arrived in California on
March 7, drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, and had lunch at Big Sur.
Surfing the
dunes
Having reached the Pacific Ocean, the men
felt they had proved the doubters wrong. They celebrated by diving into
the ocean. “We said, ‘Okay, if we’re going to prove we made it, we’re
going in,’” Baginski said.
Although the Pacific was their “We made
it” point, the travelers continued north to San Francisco on March 8,
where they saw the Golden Gate Bridge and several wineries. From there,
they drove north through the Redwood Forest, waking up in eastern
Washington on March 9.
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Seals basking on
a Pacific beach |
March 10 was spent traversing Idaho and
Montana; stops were made in Iowa on March 11 and Chicago on March 12.
The group arrived back in Indiana on March 13.
From eating crawfish in Louisiana to hot
dogs in Chicago, the travelers tried to taste as much of each region as
possible. “Every place we went, we wanted to understand it,” Kambitsis
said.
For Karas, adapting to ever-changing
surroundings was all in a day’s work. “The essence of the geographer is
to be able to leave and not know where he’s going to be but still be
able to play off that culture and land,” he said.
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Karas plans to take over his family’s
Indiana Italian restaurant, Nap’s Cucina Mia, after his December
graduation. For Baginski, who graduated in May and is working at
Yellowstone National Park, the trip was a pointer to what he hopes to
study in graduate school.
“I’m looking into city design—interstate
and highway systems,” he said. Highways are something he should know
something about.
Ashley Gurbal is a
senior journalism major from Clearfield, Pa., and is a staff writer at
the Indiana Gazette. This story is adapted from one that
originally appeared in the April 24 edition of the Gazette.
Gurbal is currently on internship at the Altoona Mirror. |
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