"Ocean in view! O the joy!"

You have no idea how badly I wanted to make an udder pun when I was writing about the organic farm. I couldn’t bring myself to it, but I had to tell you now. Moving on.

Britton didn’t think I said enough about our hiking day in Michigan, so I wanted to mention that again. It was a rainy day, but the heavy trees guarded us from the brunt of it, so it was cool and misty, in an incredibly green forest. That day we came to two memorable waterfalls, one of which led to some rocky shallows that were perfect for a cold swim. Terribly cold. It really was a highlight.

Everything in Michigan was a highlight. We were staying with Britton’s friend Jonathan, at Jonathan’s grandparents’ house. While there we had three of our fullest nights of sleep yet, monstrous meals that never really seemed to end, and the birth of a new addiction to Dairy Queen’s Blizzards. I think we stopped at Dairy Queen four times in the last week and a half. So thank you Jonathan. And thank you, Upper Peninsula. You were great.

From Michigan we drove down to Minneapolis to catch Rob Bell on his speaking tour. This is the guy we met at his church back in Grand Rapids. The tour is called Drops Like Stars, and it’s pretty profound--definitely good to see if you’re at all interested. I didn’t find it quite as mind-blowing as his earlier topics, but it was worth the trip for sure. Minneapolis, though, was kind of sad (except for the free burgers and shakes at Applebee’s) and we weren’t too upset to leave.

After sleeping in a Panera parking lot outside the city and waking up for some breakfast and Internet, we started one of our biggest driving days yet. We cut through the rest of Minnesota and started crossing North Dakota, which was a bear and a half. At one point we drove through Fargo. It felt like some sort of Coen pilgrimage that went vaguely unfulfilled, so we kept driving. We found a small campground/RV park in Jamestown. That was nice, we met some friendly people (two guys who gave us free firewood, one girl who may have been a dream). It was definitely for travelers rest, though, not so much of a destination.

And so the next day we continued, out of North Dakota and into Montana. It feels like a cliché to write about the sky in the big sky states, but I can’t help myself. The clouds were incredible. Even in parts of Minnesota and North Dakota, they were layered in a way that created unending depth. The top was a dome of the deepest blue, lightening on the sides until it streaked with clouds that extend well beyond forever. It absolutely overwhelmed the earth. I felt as if one of those hills might bring us to the edge of the land, with nothing but sky reaching into a cloudy, blue infinity. It brought me back to the stars in Michigan, where for just a few moments I was fully aware of my smallness.

Then the ground started making a comeback. By this point it was getting dark, but even so we could feel the endless Salt Plains giving way to the Rockies. The silhouetted mountains grew and we followed them up, up, up until we were about a mile from an entrance to Glacier National Park. We slept there on the side of the road, where it was dark and cold and even in the dark the mountains were everywhere. The next morning we drove into Glacier, using the annual pass we bought back in Maine.

Without knowing it, we had driven into a secondary entrance. While the main areas of the park were flooded with tourists and traffic, we had stumbled into one of Glacier’s best kept secrets. That day we found a campsite then hiked up a three mile ridge trail that circled around and offered views in every direction. You should’ve seen this: from the top we had the rest of Glacier to the north and the west, the Rockies continuing to the south, and the abruptly flat Salt Plains to the east. Those mountains were about the most awe-inspiring things I have ever seen. We spent a couple hours at the top, reading and napping and staring and wondering and…oh man, those mountains were ridiculous.

But I have to keep going. The next day we drove around to the main entrance to Glacier, then followed the Road to the Sun across the park. My mom biked that road, apparently. I think that’s insane. Despite the traffic and crowds, Glacier was exceedingly beautiful. The mountains were still overwhelming, and we took a hike that followed a gorgeous lake to a couple of different waterfalls that were inspiring and charming and thunderous in all the ways that good waterfalls are. We saw a few moose (mooses? meese?) across the lake. My dad’s binoculars came in handy.

We went to Ranger talks both nights in Glacier. This is when campers and visitors can go to an amphitheater to see a park ranger give a presentation. The first ranger was funny and strange and engaging and he talked about birds. He even had a little bird puppet with a can of whipped cream up its butt. I’m not telling you anymore about that, because I kind of like the way that last sentence sits there unexplained. The second ranger was nervous and soft-spoken and talked about art. Apparently when Glacier was founded about 100 years ago, the railroad used to pay artists to live in Glacier and write or paint or take pictures that they could use as promotion back east. I thought that sounded like fun. I want someone to start a new national park so they can pay me to live there and write about it.

There is a certain feel about national parks that stirs all sorts of things in me. I have an ongoing theory that people are more pleasant when they’re enjoying nature together, and that was on full display at Glacier. All these people from all over the country, and the world, saying hello while passing on the trail, stopping for a chat in the campsite, visiting with each other before the ranger talk. Everyone seemed friendly, and everyone was so happy to be there that it affected everything--especially how they interact with each other. It’s a wonderful thing.

Stay away from the hotels, though. On the second night, our campsite wasn’t offering a ranger talk, so we had to go up the road to the lodge to hear the art girl. The lodge crowd was entirely different: freshly showered, reserved, not showing much of a desire to meet new people. Stick with the camping crowd; everyone’s excited to be there and pleasant and vaguely tired and often quite dirty and terribly wonderful.

Side note: speaking of the camping crowd, some of the families we saw in Glacier reminded me so much of my family, especially my family in the late nineties when we took our RV trip out west. There were the parents who were always busy, cooking and cleaning and planning and setting up for their kids who are having the time of their lives exploring and biking and running and climbing. This made me think about my dad a lot. At one point in Glacier, I couldn’t stop; everything reminded me of him. I think it was good, though. There was sadness, but it was a full, nostalgic sort of sadness. He would have loved it there.

Oh yeah. Glacier was also home to my two favorite moon nights on this trip so far. The first night, we left the ranger talk in time to see a thin sliver rising up toward one of the mountains, hovering over the lake across from where we camped. That was incredible, watching the moon and its reflection slide up and behind the giant silhouetted peak. That lake was freezing, by the way. We had gone swimming earlier in the day and it was shocking. Painfully refreshing, maybe.

The second night we left the ranger talk by the lodge and walked down to a different lake. The moon was slightly bigger this time, and it was higher so it hung over the mountains perfectly. We rested by the lake for a bit, watching the reflections and the ripples and the shadowy mountains and the ghostly moon. Those were two nights I won’t forget for a very long time.

Okay. We left Glacier, finished Montana, cut through northern Idaho, and entered Washington. This was a surprise: Eastern Washington, much like the states preceding it, was blanketed in endless fields and farms and slight, rolling hills. Everything was brown and dry. The fields gave way to a rocky sort of desert, everything still quite brown. But then we started going up. The Cascade Mountains waited in the background, and we rose toward them, winding through rocks and cliffs and the occasional lake. Then we crested the mountains and everything changed. We had stretches of road where I could drive at 70 miles per hour for thirty minutes without once touching the accelerator, winding down, down, down as everything started turning green and wet, exactly what you’d expect out of Washington. We passed through fruit country and picked up some fresh apples and cherries, then continued toward Tacoma, a little outside Seattle.

This is worth a new paragraph. We drove to Tacoma to visit Ellie, a friend of Britton’s from YWAM. Ellie lives on a gorgeous little farm, with beautiful flowers and different types of plants and tomatoes that taste like sunshine and chickens and roosters that insist on waking you up for forty-five minutes every morning to greet the sun with them. We spent three nights there, along with Autumn and her mom. Autumn is another friend of Britton’s from YWAM that happened to be visiting at the same time. Our stay there included delicious meals, Trivial Pursuit, a beach with a lighthouse, Coraline, a glass museum, a great bookstore, and all sorts of wonderful conversation.

Then after three nights, it was time to cut south. This is significant to me because our trip is largely three-directional. First we went north, then west, and now we’re headed south--the final leg. I was a bit sad when we realized there was no more west without water, but California beckons.

We left Tacoma, spent a couple hours in Seattle, then drove to Portland. With no offense to the East Coast, Portland is without a doubt my favorite city in the country so far. We rode our bikes for a while--did you know Portland is rated the most bike-friendly city in the country?--then found a Chipotle, caught a movie, slept in a church parking lot again, and met a friend or two with some exciting future possibilities. There’s a certain feel about the city that I am absolutely in love with. If LA doesn’t work out and I’m not ready to move home, then I’ll be looking for any excuse to move to Portland.

Graduate school? I think yes.

Our second day there we rode the streetcar for a bit, read in a park, then went back to Powell’s Books. Powell’s is possibly my favorite indoor space ever, but it’s really overwhelming. They give you a map when you walk inside. I think I would need to live in Portland and visit often to really appreciate it. After that we grabbed some fish and chips with a new friend we’d met that morning. We planned to sleep in our car again that night, or possibly join one of the homeless campouts downtown, but we decided to start driving instead. We headed down past Eugene before we started getting tired, so we found a place to sleep on the side of the road.

We woke up this morning and drove out to the coast, where we picked up 101 and headed south some more, down to Coos Bay where we spent the day. Another of Britton’s YWAM friends lives here. She and her family drove us to the coast, where we climbed some rocks and watched the Pacific crash and spray and wave and dance. It’s beautiful.

That was a big moment, our first view of the Pacific. We followed a huge section of the Lewis and Clark trail through North Dakota and Montana, even up toward Portland, so today I kept thinking of that “Ocean in view! O the joy!” moment at the end of their journey. Maybe we weren’t quite frontier explorers with Indian guides or anything, but it still felt significant and fulfilling. And it was beautiful watching the waves tear across the rocks, flooding crevasses and creating little rivers, then retreating back out only to splash around and do it all over again.

We’re still in Coos Bay, writing this from the back of a little camping trailer we’re sleeping in tonight. Tomorrow we’ll keep heading down the coast, savor Oregon a little longer, then say goodbye and cross our final state line into California. Redwoods are waiting on the other side, which is exciting. Exact schedule after that point is still a little hazy, but we now have an official deadline: we have to be in LA by Saturday, because Caroline and Grahm are meeting us with Britton’s car out there then flying back on Sunday. That’s awesome of them, and it’ll be good having both our cars out there so soon.

Still not sure about the whole housing and work things. We have some awesome friends, David and Neil, who are being really generous and offering their space for a few nights until we get things going, and they’ll help us get situated in the city, but we’re definitely looking at any availabilities right now, so let me know if you hear of anything.

I think it’s time to wrap this up. I keep getting really encouraging feedback from people reading our updates, and that means the world to me. A friend from Jacksonville even told me that his family gathers around to read these, which makes me exceedingly happy. So thank you all. Especially those of you still reading this one, because I just scanned over it and realized that I’m writing a small novel.

I’m excited about using this space after the trip, when there’s not a pressure to fit so much in. I have stories and thoughts and ideas I want to write on here. And I will eventually. But for now, reading time. Then bedtime. Then some California time.

Goodnight all. Remember love.