Portland..

Well, I'm in Portland now. It's been an eventful week, with 12 states crossed. That's saying a lot since it's not New England area! The least exciting was Minnesota, because it was long and much the same as Michigan and Wisconsin. My route went from Michigan-->Indiana-->Illinois-->Wisconsin-->Minnesota-->South Dakota-->Wyoming-->Montana-->Idaho-->Washington-->Oregon.



I'll be here a few days before making the rest of the way to my summer position as a backwoods forest ranger in Nevada!

It's an exciting trip of a lifetime. And there were only about 5 minutes of loneliness in the journey. Guess I was peopled out. There was just so much going on around me, the landscape was completely delightful, and that helped. Probably knowing I was heading toward friends didn't hurt.



Was able to visit an old college friend in Seattle for a few days, and now am with a travel buddy who is from Hawaii and went to school in Oregon but we met in Shanghai. It's nice to be a little more at rest today, doing laundry and looking for storage for the summer so that my car begins to have a little more space in it...like for a friend to sit somewhere!



It's difficult to choose a favorite image, but this one captures the opening to the badlands by hinting of a peaceful landscape but then opens up to magnificent cliffs and boulders, prairie dogs and muddy rockslides. If you want to see some multitudinous amounts of photos from the trip out west, check out my photo site: Flickr.