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!