a few photos from a whirlwind tour of the States

Between Aug. 1 and Aug. 24, I drove almost exactly 4,000 miles - from Hattiesburg, Miss., to Missouri, to Denver, to Montana, to Oregon (via Seattle).

I didn't have time to put much up about the trip while it was happening, and now it might be a little late to recreate some of my thoughts while we were driving around. But one thing a road trip of that magnitude will reveal (besides the fact it's surprisingly tiring to sit in a car all day) is the sheer magnitude of so much around the country. It's especially revealing when you come to a place like New Zealand. My month-long trip across part of the U.S. was long enough to drive north to south along both islands of New Zealand and back again - and then back down to the south. (Although here they don't have the beauty of a nation-wide, four-lane, limited-access highway system).

Driving across the states we ran into monster thunderstorms (we drove through the same front three times between Columbia and Denver, and each time hit blinding rain for about 20 minutes), the plains of Kansas (I could have done without seeing those again) as well as Wyoming, Montana, Washington and Oregon, mountains all around, and friends and family I'm glad I got a chance to talk to before leaving the country.


I drove Glacier's Going-to-the-Sun road for the first time in what I figure was about a decade, and got to introduce someone new to the park.
















We had to decide the route to get from Missoula to almost Portland one day, and decided to take a few extra miles to stop in Seattle at sunset, which was the perfect choice.











And I got to mark two milestones off at once in the second-to-last stop: not only did I knock off another state by setting foot in Oregon for the first time, I also completed the travesty of visiting all three of my siblings at their college (not an easy feat, considering the three locales were New Orleans, Boston and Corvallis, Ore.).

An inaugural trip to Portland determined I liked the city as much as I thought I would, from the massive bookstore to the underground bar some acquaintances-of-a-friend took us.



















We saw sea lions in Oregon and again in California just south of Carmel. We walked on a wind-blown beach in Oregon and then a golden, sun-warmed beach in California. Sunsets from the top of a mountain in Montana and overlooking the sound in Seattle. Saw Bob Saget at a comedy club, Mount St. Helens vent steam into the clouds and capped it all off with a perfect sunny day watching baseball by the bay in San Francisco.

Thankfully, by the end of the trip we had traded in the car for air travel. Then we jumped all-in for the air travel, and traded in late summer for late winter.