Terra (Kinda) Firma: Durham, NC

If this were a more serious blog, I’d insert a thoughtful quote here about how the true purpose of travel is to return to where you started from and discover it anew.

Actually, I would insert that quote here, if I could remember who said it. Thoreau? Fitzgerald? You know the quote I’m talking about, right? It’s generally overlaid across stock photos of beach sunsets, and your aunt probably posted it on Facebook when she got back from Waikiki.

In lieu of more eloquent verbiage, let me just say this: it’s really, really nice to sleep in a bed. And to have running water. (HOT water, no less! What are we, royalty?) It’s also really great to pass a whole day without cursing at Google Maps, or arguing over who let a mosquito into the tent.

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know what to say. After almost six months on the road, Sean and I finally made it back to our starting point — Durham, North Carolina, where we dropped our cat Phoebe off with my mom back in June. What’s happened in between is… well, this entire blog, and so much more that I haven’t yet figured out how to put into words.

Sean and I have both learned a lot about ourselves and each other. I have to say, the everyday peaks and valleys of having a relationship feel pretty manageable after you’ve been lost in the Mexican desert together with a low gas tank and no cell signal. We almost killed each other several times, but we didn’t, because it turns out we actually like each other quite a bit.

This trip has made me realize how lucky I am (how — dare I say — #blessed?) to have such dear friends and family in so many corners of the world. It’s also made me immensely grateful for the generosity of strangers, and made me wish for a world where everyone could feel that generosity.

Still, while I’ve seen a lot of beauty this summer — more than I know how to process, really — I’ve also seen some things that were very hard to look at. We’ve driven through days’ worth of half-abandoned towns, communities that have been left behind by corporations that moved to where the labor was cheaper or the taxes were lower. We spent three weeks traveling freely in a country full of people that our own government would imprison if they dared to cross our border.

It’s hard to make sense of all that, and to let it into your heart in a way that doesn’t incapacitate you. For that matter, it can be hard to let all the beauty and love and hope in the world into your heart, too. I guess I’ll have to make a bigger heart, which I guess is what I’ve been doing all summer, which I guess is why I was such a crank for much of it. Growing pains are a real jerk.

Anyway, we’ve made it to Durham, and our traveling days are over — for now. The next adventure is going to be turning all the things we’ve learned and the crazy experiences we’ve had into something we can share with the world — and stay tuned for that, because we’re ready to hit the ground running.

First, though, hot showers — and cat snuggles.

This is Team Watermelon, signing off.

Home Stretch: IL, IA, MO, TN

After two months of cooling our heels in Wisconsin (literally and figuratively), it was time to close the final gap between where we started and where we’d wind up. We said our goodbyes in Madison and hit the road for our first stop: Galena, Illinois.

Despite living in Wisconsin and Iowa for most of my life, I’d never heard of Galena until a few years ago. It’s a well-kept secret of the “Driftless State” — a sort of self-fashioned sovereign land made up of the corners of Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois that didn’t get smooshed flat by glaciers. We stayed with some friends of mine, who restored an old schoolhouse there and now run their own ghost tour company.

(It’s OK, I’m sure your friends are cool too.)

Focus on the gorgeous schoolhouse, not how dirty our car is.

At one point, Galena was a steamboat hub and mining town that was set to become the next great metropolis. When both of these industries went bust, however, Galena was abandoned so quickly that no one even bothered to tear down the beautiful brick buildings left behind by wealthy families and their businesses. As you can guess, this makes it a modern haven for history lovers — and ghost enthusiasts.

After an excellent dinner, some spooky stories, and an informal tour, we set off for our next destination: Cedar Rapids.

(Though not, of course, before Sean did some bonding with his long-lost puppy cousin, Winn-Dixie.)

In Cedar Rapids, we visited one of my oldest friends, who recently moved back to Iowa with her family. Her kids treated us to a magic show, which I have to admit I was genuinely baffled by. Like any self-respecting performers, however, they refused to reveal their secrets.

After Cedar Rapids, I took Sean for a brief tour of my hometown in Washington, Iowa (a “tour” takes all of about four minutes), and we had lunch with my old violin teacher before hitting the road again.

Our next stop was Nashville, where we met up with some friends who happened to be on tour with their band, Pink Neighbor. They played at a scrappy little bar called the Basement, along with a handful of other touring bands.

I know technically one is supposed to listen to country in Nashville, but I like these guys better than Brad Paisley and I will gladly fight you on that.

Up next: home sweet Durham! Time to see if our cat remembers who we are.

Autumnal Wonderland: Wisconsin (part 2)

The Midwest has its faults. Having lived in Iowa and Wisconsin for most of my life, I can tell you that everything you’ve heard about the corn-to-human ratio is true. We are not generally people of great worldliness or sophistication. We’ve been known to say “libary.” We are adamant that cheese curds belong in the food pyramid, somewhere between cheap lager and Culver’s Butter Burgers.

But man, do we have a lock on autumn.

Here’s the thing: when all those overpriced catalogues and cutesy craft blogs try to sell you the idea of “autumn,” they’re talking about our autumn. California’s got some things going for it, but go looking for a cup of hot cider on a wagon ride through a pumpkin patch full of vibrant autumnal hues and you will be disappointed, my friend.

One of my favorite things to do in autumn in the Midwest is head up to Reedsburg, Wisconsin, for Fermentation Fest, an annual event that features workshops on making everything from yogurt to kombucha, as well as food vendors and community meals.

The event is put on by the Wormfarm Institute, a local arts organization and artist residency program in Reedsburg. I was lucky enough to be one of their writers-in-residence way back in 2012, and came back to manage the residency for a season in 2015. They do amazing work connecting local artists, farmers, chefs, and performers across what is lovingly referred to as “the rural-urban continuum.”

If you’re an urban citizen who’s never given much thought to the rural side of that continuum, driving out to Reedsburg through golden farmlands under a clear October sky is a great way to start. After you’ve spent a day talking to real actual farmers, watching the local dance troupe perform in a beanfield, and tasting fresh sourdough as you learn about the fermentation of yeast, you’ll start to see the area outside your little dot on the map in a very different light.

(OK, so I’ve written a lot of promotional copy for these guys. That doesn’t make it any less true.)

Sean and I made it up to Reedsburg for the last day of the Fermentation Fest. We didn’t have time to sign up for workshops, but we were able to catch the resident artists’ show at the Wormfarm Institute’s downtown gallery.

Seeing Reedsburg in its fall glory and catching up with all the good folks there completed my Wisconsin nostalgia trip. Which is a good thing, because it’s about time for us to mosey on.

Part of me wishes I could stay forever, but…

Next, we’ll head towards North Carolina, with a few fun (and hopefully warmer) stops in between. Home stretch, here we come!

Home (Away from Home) Sweet Home: Madison, WI

Ten years ago, I did not ring this doorbell.

I was already late for my first band practice with the eccentric stranger who’d answered my “New in Town, Looking to Jam!” ad on Craiglist. I could already hear her playing inside, so instead of interrupting, I decided to just march into her house without announcing myself.

That eccentric stranger turned out to be a badass musician, artist, and luthier named Ellie, and it was to be the first of many times I would barge into her house unannounced over the years. Typically, I would be met on these occasions with offerings of food and an invitation to see the guitar she was building in her workshop — or the oak log she was chain-sawing into a Tiki head, or the surreal sculpture she’d assembled out of abandoned toys.

I ended up living with Ellie and her wife, Kori — a writer and engineer who served as tech sorceress for the many bands Ellie played in — for two and a half years during college. First, I was crashing in a broken-down RV in their driveway (the first of many vehicles I would live in, it turned out); then, when the Wisconsin winter set in, I moved to the spare bedroom.

A portrait of Ellie and Kori. OK, not really, but they did dress these skeletons up as themselves and put them on the buffet table at their wedding.

Though densely populated with mannequins, skulls, creepy dolls, and alarmingly realistic rubber masks, Ellie and Kori’s house always felt safe and homey to me. I liked to call it “The Baldwin Street Home for Wayward Girls,” because, in addition to myself, there seemed to be an endless flow of friends and friends-of-friends occupying the spare bedrooms and empty couches.

When Sean and I decided to stay in Wisconsin for a while to pick up some work, I wasn’t surprised to find that Ellie and Kori had a vacancy; the house has a mind of its own at times, seeming to direct its own flow depending on who needs what.

We’re still not entirely sure what the next step is, but at least we’ve got a soft place to land. I’m doing full-time farm work for a former employer of mine, and Sean’s picked up a modeling gig.

OK, he’s working at a restaurant. And, as usual, making the world a more colorful and beautiful place.

In a couple weeks we’ll head towards North Carolina to close our great cross-continental loop and reunite with our poor abandoned cat. (Apparently my mom’s been feeding her fresh salmon and tuna, so she may or may not be in a hurry to take us back.)

It’s been a crazy and miraculous trip. Soon it’ll be time for the next adventure: figuring out where home is.

The (Very) Open Road: ID, MT, WY, SD, MN

After leaving Vancouver Island, we more or less made a beeline for our next destination: Madison, Wisconsin, where we could stay with friends and pick up some work while we figured out the next step. Originally, we’d planned on taking some time to explore the Northern states and possibly Canada, but we’d realized about two months into the trip that we were going to have to abbreviate our itinerary a little if we wanted our travel fund to last.

Sean and I spent about a year saving up for this trip, and we’ve done our best to keep costs low along the way. Even so, money was getting to be an issue, to the point where it was beginning to dampen each new experience.

I’m not saying this to be a downer. To be honest, I’m saying it because I heard too many people sigh wistfully and tell me they wish they could have an adventure like ours. I’ve been on the other side of that exchange countless times, envying friends and acquaintances who seemed gifted with the opportunity to adventure by some stroke of improbable luck. So I want to be very clear: this trip has been grueling, folks. And magical. And transformative. And breathtaking. And expensive. And worth it. But if I’ve given the impression that the last four months were all golden sunsets and hot-tub selfies, let me emphatically disabuse you. It’s been so much more than that, in all the best and worst ways.

(That said, there have been some pretty killer sunsets.)

The thought of cutting down the Northern leg of our trip was a little disappointing at first, but I was surprised to find that this more efficient mode of travel brought a sort of classic roadtrip charm to our days — something we’d missed out on up until now. It was just us and the open road: the blessedly straight, beautifully empty road that would take us across Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and Minnesota. We ate junk food from gas stations and slept in family campgrounds. We blasted FM radio with the windows down.

On the eve of my 31st birthday, we got a hotel in Albert Lea, Minnesota. The hotel clerk was a short, friendly man with a mullet who recommended that we visit the nearby SPAM Museum. We listened with the most unironic interest we could muster, sensing that he was feeling us out for how much genuine enthusiasm for the SPAM Museum he could safely give away to a pair of traveling hipster millenials.

Well, we had to do something for my 31st birthday.

While the SPAM Museum was certainly edifying, the real triumph of my special day was finally arriving in Madison. For me, this was home away from home, a place that resonates the parts of me that were formed here. (For Sean, it’s the first place he ate fried cheese curds, so basically the same thing.)

We’ll be stationed here until Halloween or so, but the journey continues, and so shall the updates. Thanks for hanging in there, dear readers/adoring fans/my mom and some rando who thought this was a recipe blog!

The Winds of Barren-Lea (zine release!)

Well hi there! We’d like to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to introduce you to our brand spanking new zine, The Winds of Barren-Lea. It’s a short fairytale I wrote over the summer, and Sean illustrated it and made it into a zine.

The story was inspired by our first night camping in Marfa, Texas, where some unnervingly strong winds broke our tent and wrecked havoc on our campsite. After that, I found myself daydreaming about a town where the wind always blew from the same direction. I started to weave in elements of our continuing travels — the way a friend described a giant shop window rippling and shattering in front of her eyes in San Francisco, or the way the halyards on my dad’s ship vibrated in the wind until they made a sound like singing.

When I asked Sean to illustrate it, he started out by drawing the characters and scenes I’d described, but eventually he chose to focus on the simpler elements — small but essential details that the characters themselves would care about.

If you want to get your mitts on one, just shoot me an email — we’re asking $5, but we’d also be happy to set you up with a payment plan where you can just work off your debt by smiling at dogs you pass on the street. Sound good?

Echinoderms and Hippie Ghosts: Gabriola Island, BC

Before departing from the land of hockey and poutine, we took a day trip to Gabriola, a small and stunningly beautiful island that sits between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

Gabriola is known for its natural beauty and for being a wellspring of creative culture, due in large part to an influx of draft dodgers during the 60’s and 70’s. The island even features a small museum with an entire exhibit devoted to the history of hippie communes on Gabriola. (Ironically, these counterculture transplants were probably seeking the freedom to live a meaningful and nature-based life not unlike that of the native Snunéymux, who were all but eradicated from Gabriola by European diseases in the 1500’s.)

We spent most of our time on a gorgeous cerulean beach fringed with ghostly mountains in the distance, clambering from one tidepool to the next to spy on all manner of crusty and crawly things.

Each square foot of this beach held its own miniature universe, crowded with crabs, anemones, barnacles, abandoned shells, seaweed, and, yes, the occasional brilliant starfish. It was easy to spend several minutes hunched over a particular tidepool in silent reverie, witnessing its zoological microdramas — but when you finally came back to yourself and looked around you, the scenery struck you speechless all over again.

As if the breathtaking beaches aren’t enough, Gabriola, like Vancouver Island, is also home to a particularly lovely tree called the arbutus — or, by doting locals, “arbeauties.” Their dusty red trunks have a sort of wistful slant, like someone twisting to look out a window as they lose themselves to a daydream.

My favorite tree, however — which my aunt Holly pointed out to us several times, with a characteristic reverence for noteworthy strangeness — is the Monkey Puzzle Tree. It’s called this presumably because even a monkey couldn’t figure out how to climb its jagged, cactus-like branches.

Holly insisted on taking a picture of me, Sean, and my brother Van in front of this tree. I think she captured the towering weirdness that is the Monkey Puzzle Tree, and also maybe just a bit of that profound silliness that sometimes happens when you hang around people who have known you since you were in diapers.

Speaking of people who know me all too well, our next major destination is Madison, Wisconsin, where we’ll be staying with some good friends of mine for a month or so while we replenish our trip budget. Do I even remember how to eat cheese curds? Does Sean understand what a high of 40 degrees in October actually means? We’ll find out.

At the Fairy Castle: Vancouver Island, BC

As is fitting of a dreamy wonderland, we arrived in Vancouver Island via a dreamy boat ride across a misty sea. There we reached our long-sought destination, my aunt Holly’s cozy home in the countryside where we’d spend a week visiting with her, her partner Kirk, and my brother Van, who’d flown up from California.

Much as Americans love to poke fun at Canada (haha, Canadians, you’re so… nice?), we also seem to have a tendency to idealize it as some sort of pastoral socialist paradise where maple syrup flows like water and everyone opens the door for each other.

While the syrup is kind of pricey and I’m sure there’s a Canadian somewhere who forgot to write a thank-you note to his Uber driver one time, I have to say I haven’t encountered much evidence that Canada isn’t a pastoral socialist paradise. At any rate, they’ve sure got pastoral down pat.

We spent a lovely week exploring neighboring islands, checking out local native art galleries and museums, and testing out every swimming hole we could find. (As well as stuffing our faces with poutine — that is, when Kirk wasn’t dishing up gourmet feasts at home, which he did nearly every night. It never hurts to have a professional chef in the family.)

I can’t decide if this food belongs on a magazine cover or in my belly. OK, yes I can.

After two months on the road, it felt like heaven to settle down for a week in such a beautiful and welcoming spot. While we’ve seen a lot of amazing things this summer, one of the most rewarding parts of this experience has been having the luxury to take our time visiting the people we care about.

Fueled up with love and blueberry cobbler, we’re ready to hit the road again.

Veiled Paradise: The Olympic Northwest

Boy howdy, guys. Boy actual howdy. I’ve been to the Northwest once before, on another sprawling roadtrip some years ago. That time, I visited in the dead of winter and still fell madly in love, so visiting in the summer was a bit like falling in love with Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and then going to see Titanic. (For all of you out there under 30 — I tried to come up with a more timely analogy, but it led me down a dark Internet hole of what young people are into these days, so you’re on your own.)

What I’m trying to say is that it’s goddang beautiful up here. We drove through towering pine forests lush with green undergrowth, misty fields where fire-ravaged trunks pricked up from the grass like gravestones. The seasides were cradled by strands of black rocks, waves crashing against them in foaming white gales.

The Northwest has a reputation for being terminally overcast for much of the year, and I’m sure this is true — although I suspect the locals may exaggerate to protect their already overcrowded wonderland — but the worst we encountered was a dreamy mist that usually cleared by afternoon. (Which was fortunate, because we were usually too lazy to set up a rain fly.)

We explored Astoria, where the Goonies was filmed, and meandered along the Northern coast of Washington, biding time until we caught the ferry to visit my aunt in Vancouver Island. We spent an afternoon in Port Townsend, a charming, cozy little peninsula town where we got to watch a beautiful wooden boat being constructed in a nautical workshop. We explored Port Angeles, where we wandered a long, narrow moraine that stretched into the sea like a crooked finger, the fog so thick it seemed to mirror the still grey of the water.

Finally, we set up camp for a few nights in the Olympic National Forest, which we easily agreed was one of the most beautiful places we’d camped so far. The trees were so thick it was impossible to tell whether the white orb blazing through the trunks at night was a full moon.

We would have gladly camped there for days, or just given up our human cards permanently and been forest elves, but the next adventure beckoned. We were about to complete our trajectory up the Western coast to my aunt’s home in Vancouver Island, which had begun to take the shape of a mythical castle at the end of hero’s quest as we persevered through the ups and downs of life on the road.

So at long last, we hopped on the ferry at Port Angeles and made our merry way towards the sea.

Onward to the land of politeness and poutine!

Forest Haven: Portland, OR

With our desert sunburns not yet faded, we greeted the cool, lush greenery of the Northwest like an exotic wonderland. As we rolled into Portland on a drizzly afternoon, we saw flocks of cheerful locals out jogging and biking through the park like it was the first day of spring. When the sun finally did burst through for an hour or so, the city basked in its full glory, like a paradise constructed by hipster wood nymphs.

Every block of Portland was crowded with cleverly themed restaurants and improbably eclectic boutiques. Within a quarter-mile radius, one could easily satisfy their needs for Georgian dumplings, designer cat toys, artisanal cutting boards, and CBD-infused kombucha. Or, you know, mermaids.

Who else is suddenly doubting every career choice they ever made?

We stayed with Chase, an old friend of Sean’s from Texas, who was generous enough to show us around town — or, at least, to a well-curated handful of what appeared to be endless points of interest. We stopped by a community print shop, where the staff graciously let us ogle their machinery and loiter in the zine library.

We also passed a very lively evening at a tiki-themed karaoke bar called the Alibi, where Sean once again floored the crowds with his rendition of “Flagpole Sitta.”

Either that or he gave a really interesting TED Talk.

Back in Chico, my grandma had very sweetly surprised us with a gift card to McMenamin’s, which is a chain of strange and fascinating establishments strewn across the Northwest. Most of them are located in old renovated buildings, such as the Old St. Francis School in Portland, where the former boiler room now holds a two-story restaurant.

I’m not really sure what a boiler room is either, but it’s pretty, right?

We ate there with Chase twice, and I passed a rainy afternoon writing in their courtyard with a brownie sundae for company. Finally, on our last day in Portland — after the exhausting work of eating Georgian dumplings, reading zines, ogling mermaids, and belting out 90’s hits — Sean and I decided to try out their heated pool.

Yes, it IS too much to ask that we both look cute at the same time.

From here we’ll continue wandering North, dipping into some Washington cities before hopping the ferry to Vancouver Island. Until then, hipster wood nymphs, be well.