"Road Tripping Down the Digital Preservation Highway" follows the continuing adventures of Peter Palmer, erstwhile librarian at Bellaluna University and manager of the library's and University's digital content, as he journeys down the Digital Preservation Highway. In this article, Palmer is put in charge of a task force to determine what should be done to preserve Bellaluna's digital assets. Fortunately he "had" been doing his research and understood the basic parts and pieces of digital repositories and the principles of good digital content and trustworthiness of archival information systems. With this personal foundation of understanding in hand, Palmer set out to identify the actual components of the University's technological foundation for digital management and preservation. For Palmer, building a repository for heterogeneous content types that could serve as a foundation for a variety of discovery and presentation layers was the best option for him, and he was going to go Open Source with it. With that decision made, Palmer knew that the rest was just implementation. (Contains 1 figure.) [For Part II, see EJ928820.]