“Why can’t we say we’re from Southern California?”
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It wasn’t an unreasonable question. Kristine and I were walking around campus at the University of Notre Dame in northern Indiana, nowhere near our hometowns. Still, it made me shudder. Not because of my wife’s cluelessness, but because someone could have heard her.

The University of Notre Dame represents one half of what may be the most unique rivalry in sports. The other half isn’t across town or in a neighboring state; it isn’t even a new conference opponent with a joke trophy.

No, the other half of this rivalry is across the country, in downtown Los Angeles, at the University of Southern California.

When Jason suggested that we go on a guided, multi-day rafting trip through Canyonlands National Park this summer, I thought he was flying a bit close to the sun.

Not because I disliked the idea. We’d done a trip like this before—a nine-day journey through the lower half of the Grand Canyon—and it still holds the title of my favorite experience to date. It was our first time in the backcountry, where brushing the Milky Way with my fingertips felt more possible than locating a flushing toilet. I came away from that trip with a greater sense of what I wanted out of life: more experiences, fewer possessions. More adventure, less monotony.

Nearly 11 months into the Big Trip, we’ve had fairly good luck with weather. We’ve hiked in 100-degree heat, kayaked in a downpour, and dealt with one rain delay among the 12 baseball games we’ve seen. For 11 months, none of our plans had been ruined or canceled due to bad weather.
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But on Memorial Day weekend, our luck was about to run out.

On our second night in a campground outside Pittsburgh, I woke to a blaring noise right beside my head.
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It was my phone. It was 1:00 a.m., and Jason’s phone was emitting the same buzzing drone. Already awake, he stared at its screen. I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and saw this:

Before I start this rant, I’ll offer a disclaimer: I’m from California. California has all sorts of bad drivers, plus a passive-aggressive style of road rage that’s unique to the state.* It’s got street racers going 100+ mph on the freeway in the middle of the night. It’s got assholes who try to cheat traffic by merging at the last possible second. And in the desert, it’s got people who think each neighborhoods’ 40-mph speed limit is 20 mph too low.
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All of this is to say that I am familiar with bad driving and am in no way trying to excuse the practices of my home state. But however bad it is in California, it’s nothing compared to where we’ve been lately.

Dry Tortugas is one of our more peculiar national parks. Despite its name, 99% of this park lies underwater; the only dry bits are an archipelago of seven coral islands—or “keys”—that rest about 70 miles off the coast of Florida; and the largest of these keys, Garden Key, is home to a nineteenth-century fort that was never finished or fully armed.

Knowing all that, you can probably guess that visiting Dry Tortugas isn’t easy. With no roads leading to the park, visitors have to either board a ferry or take a seaplane, neither of which is cheap. And before doing that, they have to get to the southernmost tip of the Florida Keys—from which the ferry and seaplanes depart—and staying there isn’t cheap either.

We could have skipped Dry Tortugas. After all, we won’t hit every U.S. national park on the Big Trip. We could have saved this park for a future trip, perhaps during a vacation to Virgin Islands National Park.

Looking ahead at our schedule last week, Jason and I wondered the same thing: Why do we have three full days in Jacksonville, Fla.?

We still don’t know. Our best guess is that it’s a casualty of the many times Jason reshuffled our schedule to accommodate the Major League Baseball and college football games we want to attend this year. In any case, the question of why we had three days in Jacksonville was a moot point; the real question was, what do we do with them?

Aside from a round of golf for Jason, we couldn’t find much that interested us. (Sorry, Jacksonville.) But outside of Jacksonville?

Well. We couldn’t help noticing that, just two and a half hours away, was Kennedy Space Center.

Jason and I made a big mistake on our way out the door this morning. We just didn’t know it until 45 minutes later, when we got to our destination.

As soon as we pulled up to Kingsnake Trailhead in Congaree National Park, we hopped out of the truck and dashed to the boats lined up near Cedar Creek. We had a three-hour kayaking trip scheduled to start at 12:50 p.m., and we were running late. It’d taken longer than expected to fix something on the truck this morning,* so we’d had to grab our gear in a hurry and rush to the park as fast as we could.

At the trailhead, we found our kayaking guide right away. Strangely, he looked as frazzled as we felt.

Are we that late? I thought, but it was only 12:52 p.m. Our guide was still readying the boats, our fellow paddlers still zipping up their life jackets. If we’d caused a delay, it wasn’t a big one.

Then our guide told us, “I don’t know if you’ve seen the radar, but it’s coming.”

It meaning rain. A lot of rain. And, because we’d rushed out the door, Jason and I had forgotten our rain jackets and dry pants.**