Pictures from Truckee, Ca; Nevada; and Utah to Salt Lake City

Here are some pictures from the last two days (Our one day stay in Truckee and our 8 hour drive with Jim the bombmaker all the way to Salt Lake City, Utah). A blog post from Kevin will follow shortly.


The inside of Soren's cabin.



The view from Soren's porch.


Us at Lake Tahoe in Truckee.


Us driving Soren's purple Toyota.


Ariel view of Lake Tahoe.


Donner Pass.


On Soren's snowmobile.


Somewhere in Nevada.


Shooting roman candles with Jim, our 8-hour ride to Salt Lake City.


Somewhere else in Nevada.


Outside the Casino on the Nevada/Utah border.


Inside the Casino in Nevada right on the border.


The Salt Flats of Utah.


Sunset right outside the Salt Flats and right before Salt Lake City.

Pictures from Malibu to Truckee

Here are some pictures but to learn more about our trip you can read a brief summary of our adventures below.


Elephant Seals along the Pacific Coast Highway


Us near some vista point near a bridge during our ride with the Germans


The view from the Vista Point/Bridge Area


Where we slept the first night on the road (Point Lobos State Park)


Trolley in downtown San Francisco


On the Golden Gate Bridge (actually made of gold)


Snow drift in front of Soren's house after the blizzard

Three Days on the Road...

This blog has to be quick because right now we are being timed by a librarian who seems to be very strict about the time limit (20 minutes) she has given us for internet privelages.

On Saturday morning we left Kelly's house (Kevin's cousin), and she drove us all the way to Malibu to give us a headstart on catching a ride away from LA. We stopped along the Pacific Coast Highway near a lookout spot where the water was green and dolphins were rolling playfully through the waves. Our first ride north came from a pair of German guys who said they wanted to go to San Francisco. In the car we talked about politics; the differences between driving privelages and drinking privelages in our two countries; and anything we could think of talking about. After riding in the car with them for several hours we became friends and ended up taking pictures together at various stops including a beach filled with hideous looking, lazy, bloated elephant seals. Near dark we had the Germans, Bastian and Christoph, drop us outside Point Lobos State Park. We hopped the fence and hid out a little ways from the ranger station till morning, terrified of bears and "black eagles".

The next day we started trying to get rides early but didn't have any luck until almost 10:30 when Ernesto gave us a ride to Seaside, CA where he recommended we get money from Western Union to head home. However, we spurned his advice and after charging our phones and buying a map, we received a ride from Lisa to Gilroy, CA (the garlic capitol of the world). We waited in Gilroy for a little bit and met a strange man who made us leave the sidewalk where we were soliciting rides because he said, "We own the sidewalk". After about an hour of waiting we switched up our signs (one read: San Francisco or North, and the other read: 2 College kids from North Carolina). We made a new sign that read: We brushed our Teeth This Morning. That did the trick. We scored a ride with three college girls on their way to Santa Rosa (Which scholars say means Rose Killer) and ended up getting a guided tour of San Francisco with Meg, Stephanie, and Erin. After the tour, Meg took us to her house where her parents showed us immeasurable hospitality, allowing us to shave with their razors, use their shower, do our laundry, eat with them for dinner, and sleep in the guestbedroom.

The next day Meg dropped us off on Highway 12 headed east. We were only by the road for maybe an hour when Matt from North Cal picked us up and took us east almost a 100 miles to Sacramento. He was a good guy who had dreams of being a farmer, a man after my own heart, and he even gave us "lucky crystals" that his friend collected from a cave in Arkansas. In Sacramento we really had a struggle finding a ride and thought for a little while we might have to sleep in Wal-Mart, a movie theater, or Barnes and Noble because it was raining and we were in a bad part of town. Luckily, Beauty school student Tess and her friend Brenden gave us a ride to Auburn to escape Sacramento where we ended up in another sketchy part of town. Luckily two highschool girls took pity on us and gave us a ride out of the bad part to an area where we could definitely camp but probably not catch a ride on the Interstate 80 since it was so rural. However, our lucky crystals pulled through and within 30 minutes our new friend Teddy came up to us in his car for the second time (The first time he was only going one exit east) and offered to take us to Lake Rawlins. After 10 minutes in the car his offer changed and instead he took us to Taco Bell where he treated us for dinner then drove us all the way (nearly 80 miles) to Truckee, CA where we are currently staying with our new friend Soren. Soren has an awesome house and has been so nice and interesting to get to know.

Our internet time is about to be revoked so I will sign off and later, Kevin will upload videos and photos and tell you about them. Follow us on twitter or facebook too. We are trying to update those sites as much as possible from Kevin's phone.

That's all for now.

What We Have Been Up To (By Kevin)

Day 3
Current Location: Los Angeles(Still)

Here is a quick update on what we have been up to. (Beware: it is quite lengthy)

Chuck and Ian drove us to the airport at 430 in the morning on Wednesday after a few goodbyes to close friends. We both had to check our bags because they were too big to have as a carry-on. We found our gate and tried to sleep but the airport was super cold so we both read for a little while until 6 when we boarded our flight. I slept a little in the airport and on the planes but Zac mostly stayed awake and read because his legs were cramped behind the seat of a crabby geologist on the plane. Both the planes were cold and we had to ask for blankets because the only clothes that we had with us were white tee shirts and shorts. (Which has pretty much been our attire for the trip thus far.)

We landed in LAX around 11am(Pacific Time) on Wednesday and picked up our baggage and then had no idea how to get anywhere in Los Angeles. We called my friend Madison, who lives in Hollywood, and found out that we could take a bus and a subway to get really close to where he lived so we charged our phones and saw Ice Cube walking through the terminal while we were waiting. We almost got onto the wrong bus but a lady stopped us and asked us if it was our first time in Los Angeles. We said yes that it was and got to talking to her and she gave us her name and phone number and told us if we were in the area of Ventura, California to give her a call.

On the bus we meet a creeper man named Victor from Guatemala City, Guatemala. He had worked for 42 years and was just retired and now was just "looking for the senoritas." This was very true because a few minutes after talking to him a few high school age girls entered the bus and when they walked by he did a couple cat calls...he was a creeper for sure. He repeated his enthusiasm for "senoritas" later when passing a strip club by chanting "YES YES YES" as we drove by.

We got off the bus and rode the metro with some crackheads and some nice poor people as well. We then were quickly introduced to the land of Hollywood. We walked around saw the stars on the Boulevard and dodged people trying to scam us. We ate our first In-N-Out burger(Which is AMAZING). And we saw lots of weed dispensaries. That night we hung out with Madison at his apartment with his Swedish roommates and their friends visiting from Sweden.

Yesterday we rode the bus to Venice Beach and saw the boardwalk, the palm trees on the beach, and muscle beach. We sat for a little while and watched a basketball game, and tried to dodge people trying to scam us again all day. Then my cousin Kelly picked us up back at Madison's Apartment and took us to her apartment in Central Los Angeles. (Los Angeles is HUGE there are 13 million people living here according to Madison.)We stayed up late talking with my cousins Patrick and Kelly and her boyfriend Jon and their aunt Mary. They were all very hospitable and fed us and gave us a place to stay for the night. They were excited about our trip and wanted to know more about it.

Today the plan was to go to Rent-A-Wreck and get a car to drive to Yosemite National Park and spend the night there and then return the car in San Francisco. But then after Kelly drove us all the way there we found out that you have to return the cars in the same place that you rent them so that was kind of a bust. So we have just been hanging out at Kelly's Apartment today doing a lot of planning for this trip. We have been looking up places all over the country to do the workaway thing and also getting some statistics for our trip. Right now the place that we are most excited about is in Wyoming working as Jack-a-Roos herding cattle on a 20,000 acre farm. We called the owner of the farm this morning but he hasn't called us back.

Then as far as the statistics go, we only have to hitchhike 165 miles a day to make it back to Cape Hatteras on June 10th. With this route planned we would be able to see pretty much everything that we want to across the nation in many states.

So for a summary: we haven't gone anywhere yet but we have a greater plan and we will hit the Pacific Coast Highway tomorrow morning, which according to Wikipedia is the easiest road in the nation to hitchhike on. We are both very anxious for this trip and can not wait to start tomorrow.

Our plan has changed...

Some brief updates before we start story-telling about what has happened to us so far:

Due to legal or bureaucratic tie-ups we have not yet been able to find an organization that was willing to "legally" allow us to sponsor them or "raise awareness" for their cause. This has been disheartening and has caused us to change the mission for our trip, but we are still plunging headlong into what we think will be one of the most interesting and life changing trips of our lives.

We still plan on hitchhiking across the country, but we have also learned just today about a service called "rent-a-wreck" which allows you to rent a crappy car if you are 21 years old for 25 dollars a day. Furthermore we now have an account on workaway.info a website that facilitates communication between families and travelers who exchange work for free lodging and food (5 hours of work = three square meals and a place to stay) without any contractual obligations. We hope to possibly utilize both of these services to help us discover even more of America without starving or freezing to death, while still spending very little money.

Now for some pictures of our first few days (Hollywood and Venice Beach). These are from Kevin's Droid since we don't have a camera.

Shot down but still going for it no matter what. (By Zac Copes)

We recently received some disheartening news regarding our trip. One of the foundations we had hoped to support, informed us that due to liability concerns we would not be allowed to associate their copyrighted name with our journey. However, we are not going to let this minor hiccup in our plans negatively affect our journey in any way.

Before we were officially "shot down" by the bigger foundation one of my good friends, Katie M., suggested that we possibly link up with a grassroots organization, something on a smaller scale, that would greater appreciate the national scale of publicity our journey is trying to bring about.

WE NEED YOUR INPUT/HELP. Now that we are being forced to slightly change the focus of our journey, we are even more interested in entertaining any and all ideas that people are willing to extend our way. If you can suggest non-profit organizations or smaller "grassroots" foundations that would need or better appreciate the mission of our journey, please let us know! We are still very interested in keeping our focus on organizations dedicated to helping children, but we are open to all ideas.

Comment on our blog
Shoot us an email: discoveringamerica2010@gmail.com
or hit us up on the facebook fan page

Anything anyone does to help us or give us input is greatly appreciated. It really makes us excited that people are getting involved with our journey!

T-Shirts and Postcards (By: Kevin Tighe)

Before I say anything else I want to say that Zac and I are so excited for all the support we have been getting recently! Whether it be through people checking out our blog, or joining our facebook fan page, or whatever else, it has been great! It has really motivated Zac and I to really step up our game and get lots of things planned out that probably wouldn't have otherwise. Also it has made us so much more excited for the trip in general!

So on that note, we will be leaving exactly 4 weeks from today!...However as exciting as that is, we still have lots of things to take care of before we go. Most of these things are fun things, which makes it great, but we also have exams and test and stuff to do too, just like everyone else. But no one enjoys those anyways so whatever.

One of these fun things is that we had an idea to make T-shirts for Zac and I to wear when we are traveling. These shirts would say something about Discovering America 2010 and have something about the foundation(s) we are representing. Then people would be able to see what we are all about before we even starting talking to them. When we told people about this they all thought it was a good idea, and our friend Phiroze thought we should make more shirts to sell to people before we leave on May 12th. These shirts would be a design probably screen-printed with help from our friend Nettie. They would be very inexpensive to purchase, probably around $10 or however much it costs us to make them. (Once again we are not trying to make money from this, we are trying to spread publicity for these organizations we are representing.) So contact us (i.e. email, facebook, text) if you would be interested in purchasing a T-shirt. We want to get a general idea before we start printing them.

Another thing that we were thinking about doing was an idea given to me by my friend Mattison. She asked me if I would send her a postcard from somewhere that we stopped. And Zac and I thought that this would be a great idea to send lots of postcards to lots of people, to whoever wanted one. However we have a lot of people following us and couldn't afford to send out that many postcards. So then we were thinking if you were to donate a small amount of money to us for our trip, enough to cover the cost of the postcard, a stamp, the fees that paypal takes, and maybe a hamburger for Zac and I,(This would all probably be only about $5) then we could send a postcard to whoever wanted one. We thought it would be a neat way for us to personally thank individuals for donating to us, and for people to get a personal update on what we were doing! Please also let us know what you think about this idea.

Once again we want to thank everyone for their support and ideas so far! This whole thing wouldn't have come together so nicely without them. And if you have any other cool ideas we are open to anything, just send us a text or an email or something and let us know what you think we could/should do!