Hello and thank you 

Hi, friends. And family. Hi, mom. 

We’ve been sitting in a plastic, pastel-colored booth at a Burger King in Page, Arizona. For hours quietly stealing electricity, water and the internet. 

Streams of French Harley riders sauntered through the doors a minute ago wearing t-shirts airbrushed in bald eagles over the Grand Canyon, a 35-foot RV called “STEALTH” is caught in the drive-thru, and beside our charging phones and laptop is a small side salad covered in shredded cheese, unopened. 

A 99-cent scarlet letter reminding us that we’re in a desert town fast food chain to pilfer utilities. 

Meredith: “Have we hit a new low?” 

No.

We’re back.  

For seven months, the naiveté that accompanied traveling to new countries was the point of leaving in the first place. Our expressions for half a year wide-eyed, the frequency with which we were fleeced incalculable. 

Now we’re in America again and it feels like growing up. 

The joys have evolved.

Unfamiliar landscapes swapped for familiar faces. Wanderings for shortcuts. Airports for gas stations. Crowded global attractions for crowd-free corners of our own vast country. 

A natural bi-product of knowing the territory, even when wandering wide-eyed still appeals. 

Let's roll. Road trip. 

Where we’ve been: Connecticut, Wyoming, California, Utah
How long we’ve been here: 4 weeks
State slogans: Full of Surprises (CT), Forever West (WY), Eureka! (CA), Life elevated(UT)
Hello: Hello
Thank you: Thank you
Where we’re going next: Arizona, New Mexico, the Carolinas

My grandmother was this diminutive firecracker. A doctor when only men graduated from America’s medical schools, she raised 7 kids, spent what should have been retirement running a clinic for Bridgeport children who couldn’t afford healthcare, and gave you money on her birthday. 

Summers in my childhood were spent at her house in Connecticut - a temple called “1918,” after its address and a number close to her birth year. 

The land itself isn’t complicated. A hulking white house, stretches of grass, high hedges, bird feeders, a swimming pool. Inside was beer, cereal and novelty ice creams, cousins, aunts and uncles, a fervor that waxed and waned over the course of long summer days. 

And after 4 years together, I finally got to take Meredith there.

It was elemental. 

Eat. Drink. Talk. Sit. Float. 

A day had passed this way and a few of us were sitting in the living room at the end of it. Everyone was talking over each other and my uncle managed to quiet the room: 

“It’s good to see the house breathing again.”
Pause. 
Someone asked what he meant.
“People. Everyone inside it making noise. That’s when it becomes itself.”

Mere and I try to remind ourselves occasionally that the places we’ve visited this year - the Himalayas, a village in Madagascar, Samarkand’s main square - keep on existing even when we’re not there. Both obvious and hard to fathom. People mill about. There are still nights and days and honking and snows and meals and cigarettes smoked. 

What we hadn’t considered was the possibility of a stationary thing becoming both more and less itself with arrivals and departures. An effect insisting on small assemblies, tightly knit, protecting the place. 

When we drove away from 1918, it felt like the curtain was coming down. A moment lit, burned and extinguished again. Something we couldn’t get back if we turned around. 

Then I thought about my older brother, 39, belly down on the floor in the living room the night before. He was playing with a Construx project from the 80’s built with our cousin Beau called “The Beetlebuster.” Someone had spared its dismantlement for 30 years, and Thomas was running it along the carpet like he might have three decades ago. 

Old as new. 

Mere and I were chatting later, sitting on a sill in what was once my grandmother’s bedroom. 

P: “What do you think, babe?”
M: “Of 1918?”
P: “Yeah.” 
M: “I like how everyone becomes a kid again here.” 

Exactly. 

The last time a total solar eclipse carved a shadow across the United States alone, our country was at war with England. It was 1776. 

So, like, no eclipse glasses. 

And then again, this August.

The “path of totality” - the stripe of Planet Earth from which the moon can be seen entirely aligned with the sun - is a thin band; the difference between seeing a small blot on the sun and the strangest thing you’ve ever witnessed in the sky, about 25 miles.

Which meant that on August 21st, the hottest ticket in the country wasn’t to Wrigley or Fenway. The Greek or the Hollywood Bowl. 

It was to obscure corners of the country the cosmos literally put on the map. 

Sweet Home, Oregon. 
Atomic City, Idaho. 
Virginia, Nebraska. 

My brother Douglas took us to Douglas, Wyoming with a group of astronomers and fans from the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. They brought telescopes the size of minivans, set up an inflatable moon proportionally distant from an inflatable earth on the infield of a baseball diamond, and made t-shirts marking a date some had looked forward to for a decade.

We sat on the grass in deep left, waited as the moon slipped entirely in front of sun, took off our glasses, and listened as the night bugs came out. 

Watched truckers turn their headlights on at 11am. 

Saw our shadows disappear and a thin pink sunset fall around the horizon in every direction. 

Like the stage lights of the world had been turned down. 

Mere described feeling as though she were levitating. I thought I was watching myself from up in a tree in the dark. Doug couldn’t stop moving. Thomas yelled. 

Everyone had a perfectly strange 2 minutes. 

It was a weird decision, on paper. Traveling four states and 14 hours, into hotel rooms and rental cars, getting a speeding ticket, extra gas and tents to watch the earth exist in one of its rarer states for 120 seconds. 

But there will be few chances to sit on an inflatable mattress with your girlfriend and your brothers in a town no one in the group had heard of, as much for the inimitable family reunion as the phenomenon. More remorse watching their rental car speed down to Denver International than putting our glasses back on when the sun emerged from behind the moon again. 

After it was over, the group of 100 yellow-shirted astrophiles stood in silence. Years of anticipation, gone in a few minutes. 

A throaty cry emerged from someone in the crowd, directed toward the sky: 

“DO IT AGAIN!”

Yeah, do it again. Do it again.

We walked out of a motel in Ashland, Oregon weeks later, and Mere squinted at our 4Runner. 

“What is that?”
“I think it’s ash.” 
“Like ash ash?” 

The car was covered. A summer snow. 

Forest fires tearing through Bend and central Washington had blanketed the Pacific Northwest in a gauzy haze and littered the streets of Ashland with Shakespeare fans wandering like dust-masked ghosts looking for an indoor Hamletperformance. 

And like that - poof! - our two-week plans for a northwest wander, up in flames.

We turned the windshield wipers on and our car around, roared down the same stretch of interstate as the day before, and leapt into 2 weeks of improvised travel. 

Bloody steaks and dark campgrounds in Mammoth Lakes. 
A dehydating tromp through rolling dunes in Death Valley. 
Glamping under the red towers of Zion.  
Breathy hikes in Bryce.

Improvisation left us with both wins and losses. The hikes and steaks countered by overnights in strip mall towns, meals eaten from the trunk, stretches of highway long and unremarkable. 

Mere had found joy in the unknown and was doodling on her phone in a straightaway headed into the blank desert of Utah, when she looked around our car: 

“Can this thing off road?” 

One of the sexier questions anyone has asked.

Yes, it can off road. 

I think it can off road. Can our car off road? I know how to off-road. What is off-roading?   

Mere had found a set of directions to a campsite near a cliff over Lake Powell, at the border of Arizona. Unregulated dirt track stretched for miles, through creeks and a Mars-like surface, off-road over granite and craters, past coyotes, wolves and jackrabbits, to an edge of the Grand Staircase National Monument.

That night the sun went down and we were sitting in camping chairs 500 feet in the air. No rangers or toilets. No phone service or way out. 

Mere had found a slice of adventure that quieted my 7-month, overwhelming urge to plan. To know every opening and see what lies ahead. 

She was asleep in our tent. I was lying on my back hearing nothing, watching the moon slowly miniaturize and float into the top of the sky. 

The next morning we’d be in that Burger King in Page, Arizona. Staring at a fast food salad, wilting, stealing the internet and power. Next year we’ll be home and the weeks ahead will be full and easier to intuit.

More valuable than extracting every ounce of possibility from every destination was this brief joy in the unknown going right. Occasions I resist in their unknowableness. 

Mere had insisted that a part of our year be unplanned, actually responding in time to the things happening around us. 

It worked, babe. You did it.  

ITINERARY, INTERRUPTED
We tend to write out our itinerary here. The oddly-spelled towns and foreign sites. Most people reading this, though, know the United States well. Or have lived in these states, hosted us, or told us where to go. 

So, a twist. 

Worst national park so far? 
Yellowstone in the summer was Manhattan at rush hour, and even with advance planning, a frenzy we can’t imagine enjoying again. Anything a mile deep from the road will be free of the throngs, however; the sheer size is stunning; and the Grand Prismatic is such a beautiful, underrated chasm of color and steam that it’s almost worth the trip alone. Almost. 

What other parks were there?  
We’ve been to six to date: Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Death Valley, Bryce Canyon, Arches and Zion. 

How much money do you have left? 
More than we thought. Once we got into the habit of curbing expenses on meals and lodging abroad, we found ourselves savoring the game of saving. Generally, a third of our daily budget goes to accommodations, a third to food, and a third to everything else. The U.S., even when you do it cheap, is just plain expensive. For us to get back on track, we’ll have to leave the country soon. 

Do you drink more or less than at home? 
Less, but more often. A glass of wine at dinner or a bourbon from the back of our car before bed. The best bar we’ve found on the road trip is in a one-horse town of Sheridan, Wyoming called The Mint Bar. Rusting neon marquee of a cowboy riding a bronco outside, taxidermy, rodeo portraits and a skinned viper lining the walls inside. Beer can be had for a quarter until 8. 

Anything weird in Connecticut? 
It’s a stretch to call Connecticut weird. The Thimble Islands come close in a wonderfully subdued, patrician sense. We sailed through a small harbor in Stony Creek with my aunt, uncle, and a bearded old captain who told stories - both apocryphal and accurate - about the mansions built on a string of small rocks inside the Long Island Sound. At one point he teared up talking about his father telling him how to save for his own boat, and the quiet that followed was good and odd.

Where do you stay? 
In Kampgrounds Of America. Like, a lot. We’re members. Membership gets you nearly 2 full dollars off a campsite. Which we ask for, and check to see reflected on our bill. We can make a call if you’re interested in being a member. Or then again, so can anyone: 1-800-CAMP-KOA.

Any crying? 
We cried at our friends Meredith and Paymon’s wedding in Lake Tahoe. Which was refreshing. It’d been 7 months of strangers and foreign languages before we came home to watch two people we know well and love make a great decision in English. We both cried silently on a drive through the middle of Arizona listening to a This American Life episode called “One Last Thing Before I Go” about Japanese survivors of the tsunami talking to lost loved ones through an unconnected telephone booth in the countryside. And I cried at a movie on the airplane called Gifted. Mere cries out of empathy for others semi-frequently. 

Best national park? 
Not best - Yosemite is inimitable - but the hike down into Bryce Canyon and out, with a picnic lunch on one of its iconic hoodoos, was the national parks system on fire. 

Memorable bite of food? 
Several. Lobster and clams in Connecticut. Cod tempura in Utah. Our first bite of Mexican food in California. The one that hits hardest was a meal we made out of the back of our car: grilled chicken, avocado and broccoli, eaten over Alstrom Point.

What about music? 
We were at a barn in Utah for steak one night, and a singer-songwriter played such a slow, sad rendition of Hank Williams Sr.’s “So Lonesome I Could Cry” that we stopped eating. His name was Montana Bob, which he says just becomes “Bob” when he’s home in Montana again. There was a lot to like about the guy.

That’s it for now. We’re still on the road - through New Mexico and back into California, across the south to Charleston, up to Roper, North Carolina, New York for a wedding - before heading abroad again in mid-October. 

Too many good people to see. Many of them you. 

Love, 
Mere & Pete