Raible Road Trip #70: To Jekyll Island and Back
My Dad's 70th birthday was January 16, 2015. Years ago, we started talking about celebrating this event and suggested we go somewhere warm. Trish and I proposed Hawaii, Mexico, or even Cuba. My Dad had his own idea: he wanted to go to Jekyll Island, Georgia. He spent a few high school years in Brunswick, GA and had fond memories of the place and weather. He also wanted to drive there, because road trips are awesome. At least they are in my family. We've done many family road trips over the years; the last one was in July.
One of the great joys in owning a VW Vanagon Westfalia is having the ability to sleep anywhere. Home is where your van is. We did a bunch of van repairs and upgrades last fall: rebuilt the transmission, added modern headlights, installed a Truck Fridge and a Propex heater. It was finally in tip-top shape for winter camping (or a road trip), so I suggested to my parents that we drive it to Georgia, via New Orleans. They agreed and we all smiled with thoughts of visiting the Big Easy. We'd never been.
My parents flew to Denver a few days before we started.
Our journey began early Sunday morning, January 10th. We left Denver around 6am and I spent the first couple hours
driving in the dark, eastbound on I-70. Within the first hundred miles, the van's odometer quit working, so we
had to rely on the gas gauge to know when to fill up. For anyone that's owned a vanagon, you'll know their gas
gauges
are fairly unreliable. Tom Hanks even talked about this on the David Letterman
show.