The Greatest American Road Trip Ever

Hello, friend!! Do you have a dream? For a moment, we'd like you to think about what that dream means to you, or at least what the dream maybe meant to you long ago, and then take a few more minutes of your time to read about our dream below.

My name is Aaron, my wife is Lena, and our 2 rescue dogs are Elsie and Rosie. Together we make up 4 Creatures, 1 Van!! We know you haven’t heard of us yet, but hopefully soon you will be able to start watching the four of us tour America on a road trip that is already set to be the most epic American road trip of all time!

We are writing today to tell you about The Greatest American Road Trip ever planned, by anyone, ever!! We've spent three to five hours a day, five to six days a week, for a total of fourteen months, planning what will be the adventure of a lifetime!! My wife and I, with our 2 dogs, are planning to leave our farm in central Washington State in the summer of 2023, to live in our newly purchased 1976 Dodge Chinook camper van, for a trip that will last at least a year and a half, spanning 35,000+ miles, while using mostly just the backroads of America!! We will be passing through every state in the lower 48, including quick stops in Canada and Mexico, while stopping at every capital in each of those 48 states, to visit the capital building itself, and sometimes two, counting the original, now retired capital building in some states!! At the same time, to plan this trip, I used the National Geographic Complete National Parks of the United States Book to help route our 35,000+ mile trip along a route that will also take us to 368 National Parks, Monuments, Battlefields, Historic sites, Scenic Trails, Recreation sites, and Seashores that make up the grand majority of the 400+ wonderous parks in our nation’s National Park System!!

You may now be thinking to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a crazy trip,” but wait, it’s not over yet!! We also used a variety (over 2 dozen websites and tons of social media groups) of online sources to make sure this trip is packed full with not only every natural wonder in this country, but also every man-made wonder, cultural wonder, industrial wonder, and lastly as much of the weird, wacky, and pop cultural wonders I could find!! Some of those include:

- A list from Wanderlust.co.uk of The Best Train Stations In The United States Of America

- A list from TravelChannel.com of The Coolest Factory Tours In The U.S.

- A list from LoveExploring.com of The Best Free museums In The U.S.A.

- 2 lists, 1 from 10Best.com and the 2nd from Huffpost.com, both of the 10 Best Brewery Tours In The U.S., which were slightly different, and I wanted to make sure we hit them all!

- A list of the 10 Best Chinatowns In The U.S.A.

- A list again from LoveExploring.com of America’s Most Stunning Natural Wonders

Along with Atlas Obscura to get all of those weird, wacky, and oddly American side stops, and the websites FactoryToursUSA.com, which will take us to 100s of other amazing factory tours where America puts in their blood, sweat, and tears to create the goods we all rely on daily, and OnlyInYourState.com so we could find all the quirky things that make each state special and unique. Also Tripadvisor.com and Travel.USNews.com to find all of the amazing and everyday must-dos and tourist spots that lie in every city and state we'll be traveling through along this amazing, Once-In-A-Lifetime Journey!! There were a handful of other amazing websites used to plan this journey, but that is a list of the most important!

We are certain you are now sitting back thinking, “Wow, we need to help sponsor this, so that not only can these 4 Creatures have an even more amazing journey, but so that I and everyone else can follow along, live vicariously through them, and learn and share in the experiences they create as they travel across this great land! Who knows, maybe they’ll become the next online trending sensation, or next best-selling book, but only if I can contribute a little to ensure that this once-in-a-lifetime adventure is properly funded! But who are these people (and canines), and why would I care about them, even though I now know that they’re going on the most epic journey of all time?!” Well, let me tell you a little about me!

My name is Aaron Williams, and I will be celebrating my 46th birthday here soon, in August of 2023. I grew up in Stockton, CA, to parents who separated when I was 5. Part of the time, I lived with my mom, growing up in a poor Mormon household, where my mom, step-father and the church did the best they could raising 4-5 young children at once. The other half of the time, I lived with my dad and my step-mom, in a drug house filled with Marijuana, Cocaine, and Methamphetamines. These drugs weren’t just done in our household, but also sold out of our house, mostly meth as my uncle cooked it up himself. As a kid, I remember seeing more than once, people come into our house with a gun demanding all the drugs/money my parents had in the house.

My father was horribly physically and verbally abusive (the thing I remember him saying the most was “Shut up, you sound like a little bitch” whenever I talked too much), he beat us all the time with a belt, his fist, and would even throw objects at us. He was arrested many times for beating my stepmom, on one occasion for strangling her with a phone cord. On this occasion she was only saved by my brother (5 years my senior) who hit my dad over the back with a bat just to get our dad off of her, giving her just enough time to get away, to the rescue of the police who had been called during the ordeal. My father was the first one to give me marijuana and meth, at the ages of 10 and 13 respectively. On top of all this, from the earliest time I can remember, I was molested repeatedly by 6 people throughout my entire childhood.

The final years of my childhood were spent living on a semi-truck, driving across the country with my father. We didn’t have a home, so I was taken out of school, and we lived full-time on the semi-truck. Between the childhood trauma and the unhealthy lifestyle of living on the road, eating from greasy spoons and fast food restaurants, with a lack of physical exercise, I ended up taking after my dad as a large man, and in the end, at my largest I logged in at 453 pounds, which in later years would contribute even more to my depression and emotional struggles. After getting away from all of this and growing up, I suffered depression, suicide attempts (my first when I was 10, when I swallowed a bottle of pills), cutting, a sexual identity crisis, a gender identity crisis, and drug and alcohol addiction that spanned many years.

It took some time to overcome the trauma of my childhood and the resulting other issues that it caused in my life. But about 13 years ago, I was finally able to heal and put it all behind me, and when I did, it fixed the many problems I had, like addiction, as well as my depression and the search for my identity, which were all magically resolved with it.

I have worked in or managed high-volume restaurants most all of my adult life, doing every position you can think of, from dishwasher to General Manager. I was lucky to work at some restaurants where I got to participate in an amazing food revolution in Oklahoma City, OK. I had the pleasure to work with a plethora of amazing and even a few award-winning chefs, and to meet and/or serve Kenny Rogers, Barry Switzer, Adam Goldberg, Christina Ricci, the members of The Flaming Lips, Kelly Clarkson, along with many top bands when I helped cater the local amphitheater with this same restaurant group, where I was employed for 7 different restaurant concepts over almost 10 years!

Because of the time I spent with my dad traveling the country, by 18 I was lucky enough to have not only gained 100s of pounds, but also to have been able to visit 48 states and Mexico. Unfortunately, driving truck is a job, which requires you to constantly move, day in and day out, so although I got to see more of America by 18 than most Americans will ever see in their life, it was mostly of the side of the highway, or the industrial side of town. So for 3 years, I stared out that window, past the shoulder of the road and the highway barriers, wondering what kind of life may lie out beyond that window, and if I would ever get to see it. Because of this travel, as an adult, I have always had the itch to move around. This led to me growing up in California, then taking what seemed like an unlikely step of getting off that semi at 18, when I was finally able to break the grasp of my father’s fear-based control, into the city of Salt Lake City, where I lived for several years, before ending up in Oklahoma, where after many years of depression, drugs and alcohol, I finally met my wife. It is now going on 11 years since I met my future wife, Lena, who is 14 years younger and the greatest thing that has ever happened to me! She has helped me heal even more so than I did on my own, and together we grow closer every day! So ever since Lena and I first started dating, between my itch to ramble and her willingness to finally leave the state she had always lived in, we began to travel, and to date have gone on over 15,000 miles of road trips across this country!

Together we have visited 100s of National Parks and cities on adventures that span 18 states, including Hawaii (my 49th state to visit, leaving only Alaska for me to conquer!) and Canada!! Finally, after 1000s of miles traveled, in 2015 we decided on the ultimate adventure: moving to a new state, where we both had no family, no friends, knew nobody, and had never been. In fact, we didn’t even go there ahead of time, instead we just loaded up a U-haul with all of our stuff, threw our car on a trailer behind it, and headed from Oklahoma to Spokane, Washington!! There we started life anew! Every day became an adventure and we have never been happier! Not only that, but with my wife’s help in becoming more active, and having a better, whole food, minimally processed, mostly vegetarian diet, I have been able to lose half of my previous self, and now currently weigh only 238 pounds! I went from being a person who worked 50-70 hours per week and had bad habits with addiction and eating, to a person who had not just healthier eating habits, but who also went out and exercised daily and did yoga a few times every week! Not only that, but my wife and I together did six 30+ mile continuous marathon-style walks in one year, the shortest being 32 miles and the longest being 39 miles!!

We finally got legally married over 5 years ago, by an ordained friend and bartender, sitting at a table in the back room of the restaurant I worked at, with no one else present except the owner and the chef! About 2 years later, we bought our first home in Ritzvillle, WA, about an hour away from Spokane. Then just months after buying our new home, our lives were changed. On the way home from a friend’s going-away party (where we later found out through blood tests, we were roofied with a drug often used for date-rapes), I fell asleep, with my wife already sleeping in the back seat, and our dog asleep in the front passenger seat. Our Subaru went up the hill on the center median where it rolled 3 times. During this process, my seatbelt snapped, the driver-side door was ripped off, and I was thrown 50 feet from the vehicle. My wife miraculously suffered nothing physically apart from a few scratches, our dog suffered nothing apart from unspoken trauma, yet my life and body were changed forever. When the accident happened, we were in the middle of nowhere, 35 minutes from the city, and it was late at night, with nearly not another car in sight. We were incredibly lucky that a volunteer fireman noticed the accident in his rear-view mirror, turned around in the middle of the highway, and came back to rescue the three of us. Thanks to his quick thinking and knowledge, I didn’t die. Instead, I suffered damage to 8 different vertebrae (one in my neck, the others from the center of my back all the way to the bottom), I had 5 broken ribs, a broken toe, broken ankle, along with pulmonary contusions, and traumatic brain injury. I came away from surgery the next day with 2 rods and 12 screws that I will forever wear in my spine, a lot of bruising and scars, a month’s stay in the hospital, along with 9 days in an inpatient physical therapy hospital, where they had to teach me how to do some things again, to do some things differently, and taught me the things that I would never be able to do again. I had to wear a body suit and neck brace for 6-7 months after leaving the hospital, and continue with physical therapy that whole time. I was told I would have chronic pain for the rest of my life, that I would never be able to bend over again, that I would never be able to tie my own shoes again, and that work would be limited for the rest of my life. Today, three and a half years later, I have greatly exceeded all of the doctors’ (including the spinal surgeons) expectations. Other than my few wicked scars, I have no limitations working, I can still hike while wearing a full pack, still garden, and still run on our elliptical for close to 80 miles a week. Not only can I bend over and tie my shoes, but I can still do yoga a few times a week. I do have some pain, but what 45-year-old person doesn’t? Either way, it is not the endless daily pain that they had warned me of.

So in the end, I overcame it all: the poor household, the drug addled, physically and verbally abusive father, the 15 years of rape and sexual abuse as a child, not finishing school, drug and alcohol addiction, multiple suicide attempts, gender identity issues, sexual identity crisis, extreme obesity, and lastly an accident that might have killed me, but instead altered my body and my way of thinking forever!!

While setting up this GoFundMe fundraiser, they ask what best describes why you are fundraising. You are only allowed to choose one option, and although I did not want to, I chose Travel, as we are going on a road trip, but a few of the other options seemed to be directly correlated with what our trip is really all about, like Community, Education, and Environment! As we are taking an educational trip down the backroads of America, into every corner, crack, and crevice, not just to the places tourists go, but also to the places that are often hidden from view; not just to State capitals and the Nation’s Capital, not just National Parks, Monuments, and Battlefields, but also to remnants of our mostly forgotten past, to where slaves were shipped in and sold 100s of years ago, and the slave houses where they lived; to where Native Americans lived for 1000s or 10s of 1000s of years, and the trails they walked (and died on) when we forced them to leave those places; to the places where civil rights were put on the front pages of America’s headlines to let us know the country we were all living in, and that we could all work together to change! We are going to the places where together the smartest men in the world created a weapon that would end a war, but also change the world forever. We are going from America’s very first Mosque, built in 1934 surrounded by corn fields not too far from America’s Bible Belt in Iowa, to America’s largest Mosque in Dearborn, Michigan. We are stopping by the largest ball of twine, largest iron skillet, so many lighthouses I can’t count, every body of water surrounding America, and a controversial fence in America’s south! We are stopping for tours at dozens of creameries, the largest car factory in America, plus a couple more, the home of Tabasco, Hershey’s chocolate, and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and the list goes on and on! Not just the many cities we hear about every day, but to many of the small towns that this country was born in. We are traveling from Sea to Shining Sea, stopping by the Amber Waves of Grain, the Fruited Plains, and the Purple Mountains Majesty along the way!

We are taking an enlightening trip that every American should go on, but can’t. We would love for you and all of them to come along with us! And I am certain in today’s world, filled with social media and the short attention spans that come along with that social media, where you can always swipe up or swipe left when you are no longer interested, that you are longing for more! I think most Americans are, especially now with the uncertainties of the climate and economy, with worries of inflation, recession, and whether your child will come home alive from school. I think America deserves more, deserves hope, and deserves the backstory to this country from regular people like us, doing whatever they can to be happy, and make others happy along the way! This journey will happen, with or without you or America there by our side, but with your help, and a little more funding, we can make this trip even better, even longer, more in-depth, and ensure that you, and America get to see it all as it happens!!

We do have Facebook and Instagram pages, under the name “4 Creatures 1 Van”, and plan on posting tons of pictures, videos, and educational links related to our stops, daily, for the entire trip. The most in-depth and personal posts will be to our Facebook page, with light mixed content on the Instagram. Follow us everywhere!!

One of our biggest problems so far in accomplishing this amazing trip of a lifetime has been the endless amount of costly, time-consuming repairs needed for our rig. We, like most Americans, don't come from a background of money, and have never made a whole lot of it ourselves in the manual labor/customer service careers we chose as our part in society, and are trying to live out a bucket list adventure, inspired by a life of hardship and an auto accident that nearly took my life, just when things were starting to go my way, with very little, so in order to save money, we purchased a 1976 Dodge Chinook. This cool retro vehicle, which we thought was pretty cute, was being offered up at a price that was just too good to say no to, $800! We knew that we'd have to invest some money into the rig, but nowhere near as much as we have. We purchased the Chinook from a 73-year-old man, someone we trusted and spent time with before buying the vehicle. He said it only had 40,000 miles on a rebuilt engine, and other than belts, hoses, tires, and brakes, only needed a transmission, so we thought this was a pretty great deal. We loved the character the vehicle had with its age and green shag carpet on the inside, and it provided us much more than we had imagined. We originally planned to just buy an old cargo van, which we would have thrown an air mattress, ice chest, and camping stove into and been happy, but this vehicle gave us a shower, toilet, fridge, stove, oven, and so much more! So, 14 months ago, we purchased the rig, and drove it to a transmission shop. The rebuilding of the transmission cost us a little over $2,100, and 30 days to get done. From there it went to another shop, where they replaced the six wheels (as they were an almost obsolete size, meaning the tires would be hard to get and expensive), six new tires, new brake pads, rotors, calipers, and brake lines, the steering column, they had to rewire all of the outdoor lights (they had shorted out and would not work), new heater blower, belts, hoses, battery, wiper blade motor and wiper blades, new oil and filter, plus sooo much more, two pages of repairs in total. These repairs took a total of 5 months to finish, since many of the parts were hard to find, as the vehicle is 46 years old, and the fact that all of this occurred during the pandemic and the supply chain issues that it created. But at the end of that time, we were excited to pick it up, even though doing so cost us $10,000. Unfortunately, we only made it 6 miles down the road before the vehicle stalled and died. After getting it towed back to the shop, they revealed that we had been lied to: the engine had never been rebuilt, and was now dead! They told us they could replace the engine for a total of $7,000. It was a very hard decision to make. At this point we had invested $14,000 into the Chinook, counting its original cost, money that we could never get back out of the vehicle, especially without a working engine. We were so far in already, with not enough money to start over with a new vehicle, that we decided to keep going, so we told them to do it! A month later, we received a call letting us know they couldn't find an engine, and after running the garage their whole lives were selling the shop and retiring! After several more weeks, we found a nationally warrantied remanufactured engine and a place that would install it. So just a week before typing this all up, we finally got the call that it was ready and we picked it up, which cost us $2,400 for the engine, then $7,500 for the installation, to have the carburetor rebuilt, and a few other small things. But at least we have a brand new engine, brand new transmission, and almost everything else in between has now been replaced as well. Unfortunately, after picking it up and filling the gas tank for the first time, we noticed a fuel leak, which is being fixed now (the last week of June 2023). We're hoping to have better luck from here on out, but either way, we still need a new battery in the rear to run the lights, appliances, etc., plus who knows what else will pop up!

When this journey was originally supposed to begin two years ago, we had saved over $35,000 for this adventure. But due to delays from Covid, a handful of other things life threw at us, and the endless amount of repairs needed for the money-pit of a vehicle we purchased to be the chariot of our dreams across this great country, we are now down to an amount that doesn't cover much more than the gas needed to accomplish the entire trip, much less food, toiletries, activities, toll roads, propane, oil changes, along with so much more, plus the random unexpected costs that are certain to pop up and add up over the 18 to 24 months it will take us to accomplish this amazing dream!

Even though money will be tight, we are doing the trip, and the whole trip, no matter what! So with your help, our adventure could be so much more, and you could experience so much more along with us! I was born into a traumatic hell that only got worse the older I got, but I made it through that journey, and with your help, we can make it through the next journey, because I, my wife, and our 2 fur babies are just trying to live our best life possible, while spreading that positivity to others. We look forward to hearing from you! We hope that you have a positive and successful week filled with pleasant adventures!

Remember, Life's an Adventure, Live it Aggressively, friends!!

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