On the Road

Rest stop, outskirts of Texas.

Here are some pics from our cross country road trip. We took a relatively leisurely 5 days to travel from Texas to Washington state. We covered a lot of ground, as you can imagine, and saw a lot of different terrain along the way: sleepy towns, bustling cities and long patches of uninhabited land. The uninhabited land always brought to mind the fact that we'd be screwed if the car broke down or we ran out of gas...with no cell phone tower nearby. Oh, our cell phone car charger stopped working, too. That was great. All in all we logged over 2,100 miles and passed through 7 states going from Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas to Raton, New Mexico to several different places in Colorado (since Jon used to live there) to Salt Lake City, Utah to Boise, Idaho to Portland, Oregon before finally arriving in Ridgefield, Washington. Whew! There's probably a faster route but we had family and friends to visit along the way.

(Taken from the car window as we sped past.)

We stopped and camped in Colorado for about 2 days. I'm hard to please when it comes to terrain (if it's not tropical and beachy it's not good enough) but Colorado lived up to all the hype. My first time there and it was absolutely gorgeous. What stuck out to me was the light. So clear and clean. I could see from the ground straight up to the puffy clouds above the soaring mountains without any haze. It stopped me in my tracks. We'd hike and I'd just stop and stare at the light coming through the pristine aspens. So beautiful.

Endless miles of flat land sped by the car window for hours.
Free range cattle on the side of the highway on our drive out of Colorado. It was so foreign to us that we had to snap a picture. That was the most uninhabited, tedious, and never-ending part of the entire trip. We were on our way to Salt Lake City and it took FOR-EV-ER.