Category Archives: Adventures

Dusting Off: Burning Man in Brief

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We wake at four a.m. to the trill of the alarm and slowly drive out past the sleeping campers who shared our site the night before. In the dark, we bump down the forest service road, headlights throwing shadows into the pine trees. We ease onto the highway, hurried, excited; our destination is just a hundred miles away. The stars fade. Pink ribbons wind across the eastern horizon as morning breaks over the high desert. Usually a desolate stretch of road, we join a kind of caravan with old RVs, a heavily loaded U-Haul trailer and a white-painted school pus piled with a jumble of bikes.  We’re all going to Burning Man, the annual gathering in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada that defies description. It’s an enormous art project. A weeklong party. A celebration of human creativity, community and ingenuity. A dance. A memorial. A test of survival skills. Yes, all of that. Continue reading →

Waldo Lake, Oregon

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High in the Willamette National Forest, Waldo Lake is tucked in a glacier-carved valley amidst pine trees and huckleberries. Revered among Oregon canoers and kayakers, Waldo is one of the clearest lakes in the world; it has no permanent inlets beyond snowmelt and lacks the nutrients needed for significant plant growth. Visibility here reaches depths of up to 150 feet, occasionally an eerie phenomena, such as when you glimpse watery shadows of your canoe on the lake floor far below, or see stumps of trees, ghost-like and covered in silt, deep in the water.

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A Month by the Numbers

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The 12th marked our first full month out on the road, but we’ve been canoeing on a remote lake and couldn’t document the occasion here.  Some quick statistics from our trip so far:

3,826 – miles driven by Patrick

107 – miles driven by Aimee

113 – miles hiked

5 – states

2 – Canadian provinces

6 – National Parks/Monuments

1,709 – photos taken

5,000 (approx.) – times Aimee has exclaimed, “look at that!”

1 – bottle of wine shattered when the refrigerator popped open on a curve

1 – glass bottle of sticky limeade shattered when the fridge popped open

21 – curses uttered while cleaning up the above

83 – meals made in the Minnie

11 – meals eaten out

1 – parking ticket

22 – nights camped for free

1 – harmonica received from fellow travelers met on the road

4 – old college friends hugged

3 – former colleagues visited

0 – regrets

Cape Perpetua

Banff and Lake Louise

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I intended this blog to be much more about food & cooking – and it will be, it will be! It’s just that these national parks are so stunning I’m compelled to write about them here.

There aren’t enough adjectives to describe the beauty of Banff and Lake Louise. Everything was “er” – the mountains seemed higher, the rocks craggier, lakes bluer, wildlife easier to spot. Continue reading →

Glacier National Park

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Limited Internet makes keeping this current a bit challenging! The past four days we’ve been in Glacier National Park, hiking and gawking and trying to stay dry. It’s been stormy, with the steep mountains draped in clouds and rain every night. Many of the trails are still closed due to snow.  Still, wildflowers are abundant as if a careless gardener threw open packets of seeds all along the roadways and valleys.  Continue reading →

First Days Out

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All night long the thunder cracked and ricocheted down the rocky walls of the Owyhee River Canyon, rain pelting the roof of the Minnie just a foot above our heads in our sleeping loft. Between flashes of lightning, the full moon peeked out through cloud breaks, washing the sagebrush and willows in pale blue light. It was not a restful night, but thrilling to hear the storm crash over us. We slept late and woke to clear skies and a warm breeze. We bumped over the short sandy track up to the main road, and drove out of the red-walled ravine into farmland.

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Dispatch From an Air Mattress

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For dinner tonight we indulged in my sentimentality and went to The Red Grape, the place where all of this began.  Where, on our very first date we talked so long they started to put the chairs up all around us. The Red Grape, on First St West in Sonoma, a local’s spot for casual pizza and pasta, just down the very same street where we found our first home together.

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Where are you going?

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Where will you go?

It’s the question we hear most often. Where? Where will you stop? Where will you choose? Where will you pass by? A year seems like such a long, lazy, empty-but-for-possibility amount of time. Yet when we begin marking points on a map, measuring the miles against our ability to be cooped up in the rig together, it is quite clear there is not enough time to see all we desire.

So, we’re each making lists of our must-see places and things to do, and trying to find the best way (and best time of the year) to see each one. Our hope is to plan as we go, taking advantage of advice we hear on the road.

Me: Yellowstone, New Orleans, The Grand Canyon, volunteering on an organic farm

Patrick: Southern Utah, Colorado, see some real Midwest thunderstorms

List-making and daydreams take up increasing amounts of my time. Whatever I’m doing, there’s the quiet thrill of knowing I’m leaving. Everything is short-term.

Introducing…The Minnie.

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She’s a 2004 Winnebago, 22 feet from bumper to bike rack, equipped with a Queen size bed, two showers (indoor and outdoor), a dinette, sleeper sofa and a three-burner propane stove. She has everything we need, which is important, since she’ll be our home for the next year. Beginning in July, Patrick and I are heading out across the country for small-time adventures and lot (and lots) of meals on the road.

We are awfully excited.