We recently celebrated our one year anniversary of living on the road. We commemorated by taking Becca Junior (our car) up to our very favorite campsite on the planet in Crested Butte, Colorado, where we promptly got stuck in the snow for the first time this year like a couple of chumps. After two hours of pushing, pulling, rocking, digging, shoving, and other exhausting verbs, we eventually freed Junior from her snowy trap and set up camp. This wasn’t how I’d hoped we’d spend the evening, but I am pretty proud of us. We “stayed frosty” through the whole ordeal, something that has been
a weirdly aspirational mantra of sorts for us this year when things don’t go as planned. Living in a tent and traveling somewhere new every few days means that our lives involve many moving parts, very few of which we have any control over which provides plenty of opportunities for us to practice staying frosty. We both feel like completely different, healthier and frostier people than we did last year when we first hit the road. We’ve put 40,000 miles on Junior this year, which almost equates to us driving from Siloam Springs, Arkansas to Selawik, Alaska every single month. The year that Luke and I spent dating long-distance while he was in school in Arkansas and I was teaching in Alaska has given us much appreciation for the absurdity of how stupid far that really is. It has also given us equal appreciation for how much time we get to spend together now, from long-distance to zero-distance.
After a Spring stint in the Southwestern U.S. surrounded by mountains, the smell of legal weed, and children named after tree species, we are finally back in the heat of the Midwest.
Last month took us through Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri as long-haul truckers in the name of the environment. Out here they eat a lot of dairy, grow a lot of corn, and they’re extremely hospitable. It’s a stereotype that Midwesterners are nice, and stereotyping is wrong, but it just seems to be so gosh-darn true, dontchaknow. We’ve crashed on floors and in basements from Wisconsin to Missouri, making the rounds of old friends, family members, friends of friends of family members, and even our boss’s old Peace Corps buddy who graciously let us use her air conditioned basement last weekend. We’re absolute mooches during the hot summer months. Let us know if you have a friend in the Midwest who would let us wash our clothes or our butts at their house.
Like last Summer, we’ll spend the next few months traveling down cornfield lined highways for various work assignments and will eventually return to set up our Leave No Trace booth
at the legen-dairy Minnesota State fair, where you can enjoy all-you-can-drink milk for just $2 a person. Autumn will take us up to New York and Washington D.C., and then down south to Tennessee, the Carolinas, Oklahoma and Texas, where we’ll take a few months off of traveling from work and hopefully do some personal travel. Until then, though, we have some cheese curds to eat and some Leave No Trace to teach.
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