The first three days of our three-week vacation to America’s Deep South

Blame the collection of ’80s and 90’s country music tapes I was raised on, blame the Hart of Dixie phase I went through in high school (team George!), or maybe some combination of both. At any rate, I have always had a romanticized perception of modern life in the American South.

Ultra dark history aside, we’re talking sweet tea, lightning bugs, sundresses all year long, AND George-Strait-brand true love. What could be more magical and alluring?

If my love of travel pairs well with my husband’s love of geography, then Alex’s love of driving to my love of sleeping in the car is the icing on the cake. All of our first dates were mini road trips and it was in those early trips that we started talking about the bigger trips we would take someday, one of those being a deep dive into America's Deep South.

Neither of us had either been South of Virginia. The deal was that if we ever just happened to come upon a three-week break we would put it towards a cross-continental road trip to all the Southern states neither of us had been to. When Alex’s boss gave him an extra week of PTO this year we had our magic . We looked up the best time of year to visit the US South and started curating playlists for each state from Marty Robins’ Red Hills of Utah to Jo De Messina’s Heads Carolina. And that was the extent of our planning needs until the day before we left when we stopped at Walmart to load up on sandwich fixings and sunscreen.

Now that we have a few other car-camping road trips under our belts we have packing down to a science. I bought my car with trips like these in mind. We can take the mattress out of our futon and fit it perfectly into the back of our Subaru hatchback. From there we treat every bag like a different “room” of the house. We pack a “kitchen” bag, full of dry goods and cutlery, along with a cooler. We bring a “mudroom” bag, with towels, shoes, swimsuits, and a bag for dirty laundry. There's even an "Office," bag filled with chargers, electronics, and reading material.

The bathroom bag is one that I am most proud of. It has all of our toiletries sub-divided by how often we need them. The soap, toothbrushes, deodorant, and toothpaste are in a bag on top because they get used twice a day, whereas my hairstyling stuff and makeup have their bags towards the bottom since they aren’t needed as often. I have a mini hairdryer and mini straightener that I can plug into a regular-plug-to-cigarette-lighter converter and some dry shampoo. I can tame my crazy curly hair that’s been on the road a few days into something presentable pretty quickly from the passenger’s seat.

We’ve been on the road for three days now. Our goal was to skip over the southwest fairly quickly since we’ve already done that trip to some extent and we wanted to save our time for everything East of New Mexico.

Day 1: Friday, April 22

Day one was a little hectic at the beginning. I’d been working 15-19 hour days for the past two months to get my post-coved surge of bridal orders done in time for our trip. I was sewing until 1 a.m. Friday and did my final dress drop-offs after waking a little later. I then had the sewing machine repairman at 9 a.m. to give Juki (my tried and true 1980s industrial machine) his yearly physical and tune-up so that I would be ready to dive back in as soon as I got home from vacation.

All that to say, I didn’t have much time to pack during the weeks leading up to the trip, so Alex and I did the majority of packing between 9 a.m. when he got home from work (he works nights), and 10:30 a.m. when we started on the adventure. We’d saved room in the cooler to stop by my parents’ bakery, where my mom had a box of savory meat pies and plenty of treats to keep us tied over until Texas. As soon as we were in the car and everything was ready, I went into the longest, deepest, sleep I have had in months. I had done it! I’d finished all of my bridal orders through May, everyone was happy, and my brain slid into the full care-free vacation abyss.

I woke up several hundred miles later as we were nearing the Nevada border. We’d decided to take the slightly longer route and go through Nevada versus Idaho because of two reasons. The first is that on our map of the US, we have pinned all over the west coast of where we have been, with a giant hole in the Northern Nevada area, and the second is due to a joke my grandfather tells about Winnumeuca.

We ate our sandwiches outside a beautiful old Spanish catholic church overlooking a half-dozen casinos and saloons, tasing in the scent of both cigarette smoke and incense. It seemed to capture the essence of Winnumeuca perfectly, where the first sign you see coming into a town known for prostitution is in the style of the free-way signs showcasing all the local restaurants, except this one was the roster of local churches.

We drove late into the night, stopping just inside the Utah border a couple of hours west of Salt Lake City. We camped off the freeway, down a gravel road in the corner of a hard saltbed. When in the PNW, we usually just pull off a national forest road and camp anywhere, but in the more populated, less natural areas, we rely on a website called freecampsites.com where you can find places reviewed on a map by fellow travelers. This spot was one we found on that site, and what was great about it was that it was very quiet and private even though it was within a mile of a big truck stop and only a couple of minutes off the freeway.

Our nightly routine in these cases looks like us washing our faces and teeth with towels and water bottles and taking out our clothes for the next day. I scoop our oatmeal and peanuts into plastic bags and fill them halfway with water to soak up overnight for our breakfast. Then we move the bags from our bed in the back into the front seats, push the seats forward to make more room for the mattress to lay flatter, and crawl into our snug little cocoon. On this trip, we even invested in a car-chargeable fan that we turn on at night to circulate air and provide a little white noise that we usually sleep with at home.

This nighttime routine from the time we were on the freeway to the time we were falling asleep took about 20 minutes.

Day 2: Saturday, April 23

In the morning we make the bed, change into the fish clothes left out from the night before, brush our teeth and wash our faces, move the bags back into the back and re-adjust the seats, and get back on the road! If it’s a chilly morning we will warm our overnight oats on the car heater.

We can be back on the road from waking up in about 10 minutes on a colder, more motivating morning, which this was.

On this particular morning, being so close to the truck stop, we did our washing there and filled our thermos with boiling water to make tea from our packed selection and also to use to sanitize our breakfast utensils.

We drove the rest of the day, trading drivers occasionally and stopping for a few snack/stretch breaks. I wound up sleeping most of Saturday, but was motivated to stay awake for Nick Offerman’s narration of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

We thought about stopping for a quick hike at Arches National Park, as it is one of our favorites, but the line to get in was at least two hours long and we had ground to cover.

We ate our first properly hot meal at a Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque, NM where we got to try fresh Sopaipilla for the first time. It’s a cloud-like fried bread that you can enjoy covered in shredded meat, salsa, and cheese, or with butter and honey. We enjoyed both, along with some brisket street tacos with fresh guac.

After dinner, we drove another few hours East to our next internet-sourced free campsite only 5 minutes off the main road. We performed our usual nightly routine, turns on the freshly-charged fan, and fell right asleep.

*Our second campsite outside Fort Summers*

Day 3: Sunday, April 24th

It had been dark when we camped, so dark in fact, that I fell asleep with my eyes pressed to the window gazing up at the milky way. We knew we were on the edge of some sort of pond, so I was excited to see the new terrain when we woke up. We parked inside a little gravel road that make a loop around a baseball-park-sized field that was enclosed in campsites fitted with covered tables, campfires, and grills. There were no bathrooms, but it was still one of the nicer set-ups we’d scored from the free campsite's website.

It was a warm morning, so we took our time with our morning rituals, even going for a little meander around the pond and out to the end of a rickety old dock. The wind had picked up, so we decided to heat our oats on the car heater and head for Texas.

On our way out of the campground, we discovered we had camped in the town Billy The Kid was shot and buried in. I’m no outlaw buff, but the romantic in me loves a good juicy story like Billy’s. We went out to the old military graveyard at Fort Summers where Billy and a dozen outlaws such as “Texas Red” from the Marty Robbins song, “Big Iron,” and some of Billy’s posse were also laid to rest.

There was an iron cage around Billy’s grave, where his and his two buddies’’ caskets were covered in cement and their gravestones were shackled to the ground. Apparently, the body and gravestone of this famed outlaw are high on the grave-robbing market and the latter had been stolen and returned twice since Billy’s death over a century ago.

Back in the car, we listened to a history channel episode about Billy the Kid’s life. His story is so outrageous that Hollywood couldn’t have shaped a better story, although his has surely shaped many of theirs. I was especially taken with the story of the young outlaw's lover Paulina, who deserved her own Marty Robins’ song in her own right. There are a lot of rumors and speculations about the exact biography of Billy’s life, but the potential for falsehood in some areas didn’t keep me from painting my version of what happened and cementing it in my mind as gospel truth.

We made it to the Texas border soon after, deciding to cut straight to San Antonio for the first official stop of our Southern Adventure. We listened to a dozen songs commemorating the life of Billy the Kid and when those ran out, we started our Texas Playlist as we rolled into the town where Waylon Jennings himself was born.

We’re about to stop for gas now, so I suppose it’s time to read up on Waylon Jennings and add a few more of his songs to the queue.

Up Next: San Antonio & Austin and… I pray.. a hot shower! What are your favorite things to do and EAT in Texas? Let us know in the comments below!