Nowhere to Go But Up

Three months of living at my parents' house in the exurbs of Cincinnati and working as a Casker Monkey and it finally came time for my and Ashley's road trip to Alaska. The workings for the trip began with fantastical G-Chats and Facebook wall posts and turned into concrete plans once I bought a plane ticket to San Francisco and Ashley gave her two-weeks notice to our former employer.

Over the course of the summer I became obsessed with the trip and put images of Alaska on my desk at Casker to pull through each day of work. I resorted to desperate measures to save money: cleaning the bathrooms at Casker for $20 cash every Friday and putting myself on a stringent budget; I even stooped so low as to clean the house of three male friends, one of whom was my 8th-grade science teacher, for another $80 just before the trip commenced.

What can I say? This Great Alaskan Adventure became my raison d’être, and I was going to do whatever it took to make it happen. I figured I would rather scrub toilets than pass up the opportunity to drive from SF to Alaska, camping and Couch Surfing the whole way.

And so, at the beginning of August, just when I was about to reach my boiling point, I took off for the Left Coast, and the way I saw it was: there's nowhere to go but up.