Fine, it's 2,251 miles.

Sometimes it is difficult to write about this trip because it feels like bragging. Right now I am typing in bed. Amber just brought me breakfast: an egg sandwich on biscuits she baked last night with veggie bacon and avocado and a side of peanut butter bananas. I'm not this spoiled every day. Okay, I am, but I am feasting on this breakfast because I won a game: guess how many miles we are from our house in Pittsburgh. Closest without going over wins. We were both pretty close, but I won. I think this was on our drive through the ugly flat dry section of eastern Washington state a few weeks ago. The distance was somewhere around 2300 miles I believe. If I were being a good writer, I'd look up the exact number so I could give you a solid, important little detail that made you feel like my voice here is authentic.

Today is not that day. Today I am a braggart, so back to it. My breakfast is amazing. It is 9AM on a weekday and I am still in bed. When we have a bed to sleep in this is how we do it: I wake up when the sun comes in the window, go to the kitchen to look at the sky, still faintly pink, then make coffee for Amber and tea for myself and climb back in bed with a stack of books. We read or write or talk about what we want to do for the day until the chill burns off outside. We wear each other's glasses and have our feet all tangled up under the covers. I say "I love you" so often is it sort of embarrassing. (Amber just came and took away my dirty plate and handed me a piping hot cup of coffee. This is WHY.)

When we have a house and a bed we tend to stay close by it, making ourselves at home, being lazy, cooking a lot (our Instagram is all food right now), watching movies, reading, and cleaning all of our things that smell like camp fire, which is ALL of our things. The days have been easy this week while we've been camped out at my dad's house taking care of his dog while he and my step-mom are away.

Living out of our car is more work. We eat a lot of suspect food that makes us rush off to very suspect bathrooms. Everything in our cooler ends up a soggy-wet mess the day after we buy it. Our tent is 90% of the time inclined just enough backwards and to the right or left that we slide over night into a huddled mass in whichever is the most damp corner of the tent. But, we can see the stars. There has been so little rain that we can keep the rain fly folded up and I lie in the tent after dark still wearing my glasses, Amber tucked into the right side of our zipped-together sleeping bags like a cold hand inside a pocket, and stare at the sky. The whole roof of our summer house is mesh.

The sky in Newport, Washington is the most beautiful night sky I have ever seen. It is so huge and brilliant I cannot comprehend it. I could watch it for a minute or an hour and still not understand the vastness. Also, shooting stars! You don't have to watch for very long in Newport, Washington to see a shooting star. Every time I woke up the few nights we slept there I unzipped the tent, peed, climbed back into the left side of our little igloo, donned my glasses and waited. Each time I was rewarded. The sky in Montana is also beautiful. Glacier National Park is a member of the International Dark-Sky Association. I am going to be a member of this association.

Portland has great coffee, amazing (vegan!) donuts, and super hip, cute, and friendly lesbians, but even at my dad's house 30 miles outside the city there is a hum. And it's not the yellowjackets, it is the refrigerator, or a plane overhead, or the neighbor's car, or the junction box. The veil of trees is thin. I didn't start writing to make a point about conservation, but FUCKING CONSERVE. Swear to me that your next car will be a hybrid (mine will), that you will put a timer in your shower. That you'll flush the toilet every other time when you pee. That you will compost and eat less meat and then only organic. Investigate where your food comes from. Plant something in your yard that supports the native avian species. Bike to work. Bike to work. Bike to work. Seriously. After you get home from work today, go into your basement or garage and drag out your bike. Spend the weekend tuning it up. Sunday, get on, go somewhere flat and fall in love again. On Monday park your ass on that tiny little wedge of foam and pedal yourself to your job. In a month calculate how much money you have saved, LBs you have lost, stress you have avoided. Is the sky getting darker as your carbon footprint recedes?

Monday we pack up again and head south on the 101. We have been traveling nearly 6 months. Sometime next week will be the 6 month anniversary, but I have to tell you, it feels like years. Every few weeks we sit down with our maps and guidebooks and the internet and all the little notes we've made after talking to people who'v been where we are going and we plan the vacation of our dreams. Then, we go and do it. And it is never perfect. And one of us usually gets a belly ache. And we never see everything we wanted to. But it is always good.

Every single day of my life is good I swear to god. Even on the worst days when I'm missing my dog or have had enough caffeine to feel jittery, bored and doomed, or when the drive is all strip-malls, gas stations and most depressing sprawl, I have Amber, and she puts on the right CD and rolls the windows down just so, and puts her hand on my thigh or says something funny and poignant about where we've just been and it's cliche, I know, but I feel like the luckiest person in the world. Or at least the lower 48.

terrain

From the New York Times Travel Section:

A Conversation Between Philip Caputo and William Least Heat-Moon

CAPUTO: One of the things that’s impressed me about traveling in this country — and I’ve done a lot of world traveling, as you have, too — is not only the size of the country but the variety of the landscape, which is like nothing I have ever seen anywhere else. I mean you can be in Arizona or New Mexico and think you’re in North Africa, and not terribly far away it might look like the Swiss Alps, and someplace else — say, the Dakotas — looks like Ukraine.

HEAT-MOON: American topography is so incredibly diverse. If you’re traveling by auto, the windshield becomes a kind of movie.

This is so true. We've been driving through the national forest lands in Northwest Colorado this week and I feel like we've seen at least 5 different varieties of landscape over the course of a few hundred miles. Sparse pine forests dotting rolling hills turned ski runs, dense pine and aspen forests climbing alpine slopes that tumble into pristine lake basins, crumbly red rock plateaus covered in scraggly shrubs, canyons where the road curls through the basin alongside white-water river, and long, flat sun-scorched sections with grazing cattle. The windshield has been a movie indeed. And, we have only visited one national park so far. There is so much to see in this country. It is truly unbelievable.

Kids, can you find both Adventure Dykes in these pictures? 

Our tent beside Lake Dillon, an hour west of Denver. We spent two nights here biking around the reservoir and hiking in the nearby mountains. 

Hiking in the mountains. This hike was close to the Frisco/Breckenridge area. 3.5 miles up to two alpine lakes called the Mohawk Lakes. We hiked from 10,164 to 12,104 feet elevation. 7 miles and a picnic lunch, then we headed to a remote (read: free) campsite near another lake. A great day.

Driving to our campsite through an aspen forest a few miles outside of Aspen, Colorado. This is Bear Country BIG TIME.

We took the train ride in Leadville, Colorado. These are lodgepole pine trees. Leadville used to be one of the biggest cities in Colorado due to the silver mines located there. It used to be called Cloudville, obviously. 

From the car, an hour east of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, just after we had to pull the car over and wait out a hail storm.We watched rainstorms from miles away for most of the the 4 hour drive to Fort Collins. The drive was all ranches and farmland. Until we got to the canyon...

This is Route 14 which runs through the Poudre Canyon on the way in to Fort Collins. Heavy rain storms do a lot of damage here because fires have scorched the soil. Scorches soil repels water creating washouts and rock slides. Just after we took this photo, they closed the road and we had to reroute. 

Here is the most handsome photographer ever atop a mountain taking a photo of another mountain. This is Rocky Mountain National Park, the first national park we have visited thusfar. The hike to Gem Lake was only 1.7 miles up with a 1,000ft elevation gain to just under 9,000ft, but for some reason, maybe because it was 90degrees and had very little shade, it was a difficult hike.