On the road again

It's hard to believe it's been four years.

Four years ago, almost to the week, I was road-tripping through the same part of the country that we'll be road-tripping through all of next week. Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas.

I had been laid off from my job in New York, spent a few fruitless weeks searching for work, and decided one day that if I couldn't solve the problem, I could at least make the problem irrelevant for a while. I took off on a solo, ten-week, cross-country-and-back mother of all road trips. I covered 19,000 miles--all of the continental U.S. states, plus brief forays into Mexico and Canada--and reconnected with the man I would marry less than a year later.

It was quite a trip. As soon as it was over, I packed up all my stuff in New York and drove it back across the country to San Diego, where I moved in with the aforementioned almost-husband. And then started this blog.

When we moved here, to Seattle, I wanted one of our first vacations to recreate the upper Western part of my solo road trip. I drove from Seattle to Glacier National Park, down to Yellowstone and Grand Teton, across Wyoming to Rapid City, SD and the Badlands. It was one of my favorite parts of the trip; incredible scenery, very few people (outside Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore, anyway), and amazing driving. My husband hasn't seen many of the places we'll go next week, and my stepson hasn't seen any.

So, I'll be blogging it all again. In the meantime, here are my thoughts from 2009, when I was seeing it all for the first time:

Driving from Seattle to Glacier
Glacier National Park
Jackson, WY
Rapid City, SD
Badlands

And hey, some pictures!