Last night’s clothes still intact and my Lady still sleeping deep beneath the sheets in the room we’d rented for a couple of nights, I snuck down the long stairway from the hotel room in the heart of Old Bisbee to step into the already daylight 7am sky of a New Year’s Eve on the [...]
Dec 31
…the story of Nathan, Renee and their sons, as they live in the belly of a '78 VW Bus. The Bus on a two laner is our true home, and wherever she's parked, well that's where we call home for the night.
A friend of mine, Flood, helped me drive our truck back from Oregon to the East. We’ll be settling down near the Smokies for another school year and as we gear up for whatever the next year may hold. Our family is admittedly getting to be too large for living in a Bus anymore…we’ve got Grandma along to help out with the baby and Lady’s general sense of well being, and we snagged up Lady’s 7 year old chocolate lab Annie, too.
Flood and I took I-80 from Manzanita, Oregon to Detroit. We chose the freeway because we were hauling a 6×12 UHaul and I figured “Sure, it’s the freeway, but it’s through Wyoming…it’ll be great.” I-70 through Colorado and Utah is spectacular, despite it’s 4 lanes, divided, status. I was wrong. I-80 is perhaps the most boring road I’ve ever been on. Very few mountains (though just outside of Salt Lake, headed East, there is some spectacular scenery) and mostly just long, flat stretches. You go from 70′ in altitude in Portland to somewhere around 7000′ in Wyoming, and back down at such a slow rate that you never really even realize you’re in the mountains.
The key highlight was this scenic route we opted for into Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital. We stumbled across these giant rocks behind barbed wire fences in ranch country, and couldn’t resist. With slick cowboy boots, though, I wasn’t making much progress…so I opted to lose the boots and do the whole climb in socks.
Great fun.