A year ago today, I pulled out of my parents’ driveway in Athens, Ga., Rennie behind me in Roxanne, because he was not yet riding shotgun all the time, and my mom and sister standing on the curb, waving at us both through the windshield. It was the beginning of my Facebook Tour and I had no idea what lay ahead of me, other than open road. Three-hundred and 65 days later, here we are, about 2,700 miles away from that starting point but if you’ve been following the adventures since then, you know that it was not a straight path to get here. There were boats to row, mountains to climb, doggies to mend, axles to fix, axles to snap, new wheels to procure, Mexican visa processes to endure and, of course, lots of wonderful memories to make.

But I still have no idea what lies ahead.

I guess we never do. We may think we do but so often, we don’t and if I have learned nothing else on this trip, I am at least wiser to the ways of circumstance. Think about how the whole journey got put on hold for a month before it even got started, and how I was then able to go to events that I would have otherwise missed, and how that allowed me to meet people I would later see again, farther down the road, or how different everything could have been, had Jugo and Bruce not been the two truck drivers behind me on that afternoon when my wheels flew off, coming to my rescue and making sure I got to my next stop safely. It’s like the movie Sliding Doors: you either make the train or you don’t, and the two scenarios that result from each ending are so completely different.

Basically, I guess, timing is everything.

Now it’s time for me to try to turn this project into something, if I can. I debated extending the Aug. 16 ending point, because I had experienced so many delays and detours along the way and it seemed like it had taken away from the point of the project, but in the end, I decided that that’s just life; that’s what happens. You set out to do certain things and you might accomplish them but it will probably not be in the clear-cut manner that you had originally planned. I said I was going to try to see as many Facebook friends as I could in a year and that’s what I’ve done. Of course I didn’t expect to have to go to Mexico twice and naturally it came as a surprise when my rig broke down not just once but two times and well, no, it never occurred to me that I would be switching horses midstream, which incidentally, is not always a bad thing.

So, how many people did I see anyway? Well, at first count, it seems it was exactly 200 people and while most of them were Facebook friends, a few of those were friends of Facebook friends, or even friends of friends of Facebook friends, because not everyone in the world uses the social network. A lot of the visits were home stays but some of them were just meals in a restaurant or walks about the park. Most of them were in the U.S. but there were some in Mexico and Canada, as well, and actually, if I counted the total visits and not just the faces, the number would be higher, because I saw a lot of people more than once, sometimes three times, and in different places on each occasion. That is: I was not the only one on the move here.

I’m still working on the mileage count. When I have it, I’ll tweet it, which incidentally, is how you’re going to be getting all updates from me from here on out. Maybe I’ll post a new entry, if I get, say, a book deal that you should know about but until then, I am going to be mostly offline, working with my word processor. Where exactly I will be is still a mystery, too. One thing is sure, though: when I do settle down somewhere, I am going to owe a lot of people a lot of guestroom space.

Before I go, though, I just want to say Thank You. It sounds almost glib but it’s not; I truly mean it. Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting. Thank you just for being here. Whether your presence was virtual or physical or both, I could not (I repeat: could not) have done this without it. xoxo

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Now Grace and Mike have moved in together and they’re in the same apartment building that Grace was in before but they’ve gone up two floors to a beautiful, airy flat with an enormous kitchen and a wall full of windows in the living room that look right out to downtown, the Space Needle sticking up just above the rooftops.

When I was here before, I did all the touristy things that you’re supposed to do: Pike Place Market and the original Starbucks and a ride to the top of the Needle and even a tour on the amphibious vehicle, The Duck, that makes you don beaks and quack like birds, and takes you past the house on the water, where Tom Hanks’s character was living in the movie Sleepless in Seattle. This time, it was more about staying in the neighborhood, and seeing what it is that Grace does at the event space she opened four years ago, Sole Repair, and getting to know Mike more, and meeting some other friends of theirs, and meeting Grace’s mom, and hanging out with our other friend, Gilbie, and cooking at home and letting Rennie be a part of as much of it all as possible.

“Seattle’s got it going on,” I said to Grace today over lunch.

She agreed. She was raised here and her family of nine is still mostly in the area and she has never lived anywhere else.

“I get sick of it sometimes,” she said, “but then I go away for awhile and I’m always happy to come back.”

And let me just say that both times I have come here, the weather has been beautiful, so that if I come back here a third time and the weather is still pretty, I will start to think it’s all a hoax, this business about it having an awful climate— like maybe they are just saying it’s bad to keep us outsiders away.

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They actually live just outside Vancouver in New Westminster but we made it into the city a few times and I got to meet several of their other friends and walk around Stanley Park, which was much sunnier this time than when I visited two years ago in rainy October, and then, on my last morning there, another friend, Tamara, had to be in town from Abbotsford for a wedding, so she and I met at a park close to Aman & Stephanie’s and she brought me coffee and we strolled around for about an hour, getting to know each other better, since we had only briefly met in March on a friend’s boat on Isla Mujeres, when I was there for one of my many Mexican paperwork trips.

Here are a few things I saw.

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The company helped, too. I was with my friend, Stephanie, and her friends, Derek and Odette, and before the music got too loud to talk, we were discussing the way of the world right now, particularly people and their social habits these days, and I can’t remember how our conversation started exactly but it was one I had begun having way back in Georgia, when I was talking to a friend— the same friend who sold me his mom’s FourRunner that you now know as Marco. I had actually flown East to get Marco and I was driving this friend back to Atlanta, because he had brought Marco to me in Athens, where he actually lived for a long time before moving to Atlanta. Athens, he said, was a scene, not a community, so people were more concerned with being in that scene than they were with you and your well-being. Of course people are going to dispute this and bring up exceptions, because there are always exceptions, but this was his personal diagnosis of the college town where he started a big, successful business and spent many years running it and also having a social life on the side and after all that, he said, there were not that many people on whom he would call, if shit were ever to hit the fan. For the record, my sister and brother-in-law are on that short list of dependable souls but they are now living in Austin, Tex.

So, maybe that was not just an Athens thing, Stephanie said a few nights before we were sitting with her friends in that Gastown bar. Maybe it was becoming an epidemic, because she had certainly noticed a degree of flakiness on the part of peers around her in Vancouver, and maybe it  was related to all this cyber socializing and maybe it was even going to start affecting real-life relationships, so that in dating, for example, people would start spreading themselves thin, as they held out for that better person, perhaps casually seeing someone for years and years until they finally ended it, because they said that it was an emotionally-shallow affair that just never progressed.

All theories based on anecdotes and perception, right? But we got onto the topic again with Derek and Odette, because I wanted to know what they thought about it all.

“I think we’re definitely reaching an age where people are too busy to connect on a real level,” Odette said. “They have (finite) time to see each other and then life gets in the way.”

She and Derek had just come from visiting a couple that moved there from Montreal a year and a half ago, for example, and altogether, the friends had seen each other twice, and now they were moving back East.

“We love them. We thought they were the greatest people. But did we meet up with them?” she said. “No.”

Odette wondered if people were eventually going to feel that lack of community and there would be a backlash and they would move out to smaller places where community could build. Derek agreed.

“I think there’s going to be a huge exodus of urbanites who go out to the country or not the country, just rural areas,” he said, “so I think rural areas are going to change.”

“Hipster rural,” Stephanie said.

“Yeah,” Derek said. “It’s going to turn into like an urban-rural.”

And then, he said, the truly rural people who are not into that are going to have to move out even further to maintain their rural reality.

“I think the hippie communes of the 60’s are going to turn into the activity communes of what whatever decade we’re in,” Odette said, giving examples, like retreats for writers and artists. “And actually, I think a lot of that already exists.”

What do you think?

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I was in town to see a friend who I did not know too well but she was excited to meet up at some point, although she said she was going to be spending much of her weekend at a music festival outside town. I was welcome to join her out there on the farm but it was a little bit pricey, so I declined, opting to meet somewhere more central instead. I figured I would find a spot to camp on the outskirts of town and that either that night or the next morning we would meet up. Little did I know what I had coming.

Three hours of driving around later, I discovered that all the campsites were either full or closed, and that the latter had no self-registration stations as some campsites do, and that worse yet, even the Walmart did not allow overnight parking in their lot, which was going to be my back-up plan. It was after nine o’ clock by this time, so I finally starting calling dog-friendly hotels, splurging in the end on a room at the La Quinta Inn by the airport. I had to lie about Rennie’s breed to get him past the front desk, as insurance does not allow pit bulls or rottweilers to stay there, and at a little after 10pm, we settled into our digs for the night.

The next morning, after taking full advantage of the hot breakfast, gym equipment and excellent water pressure, I found out that my Portland friend was not going to be able to meet up after all, because she had stayed out late and got up late and was off to the festival again. Understandable. I’m the one who let this part of the trip sneak up on me, without planning it too well, and so I set off at about noon with high hopes that things would work out in Seattle, where I had more friends, one of whom was already planning to host me. But I was earlier than I had said I would be and I could not reach her on the phone, and so I pulled over, got out my road atlas and studied the lay of the land. North of where I was at that moment and east of Seattle, I spotted some green coastal areas, where I figured Rennie and I could spend a peaceful night and I pointed Marco that way.

We ended up in the Ocean Shores area, driving up Hwy 109 for about 20 miles to find a quiet spot near Copalis Beach. Turns out we missed the action by 24 hours; the previous night, my neighbors told me, they had tossed and turned till dawn, trying but failing to drown out the pounding music from an all-night party on the beach. Two dozen bands had come out to play and many of the ravers were staying at the campsite, so they were constantly driving back and forth between the highway and the driveway, their tires crunching on gravel for eight long hours. By the time we arrived on Saturday, the tent had been moved about a mile up the beach and the only thing to be heard was the crashing of waves just over the dunes behind the office.

The next day, I broke camp early, deciding to complete the loop that Hwy 101 made up and over Olympic National Park, with the idea that I could see some pretty wilderness and also allow Seattle to get in touch, so that I would still have time to cut across the sound and make it to the city by dinnertime. I never did stop to see any of the rain forest, though, because for about 40 miles, I kept passing bright yellow signs warning of an escapee from the state correction center. Don’t pick up hitchhikers, the signs said, but I didn’t even want to stop to pee.

At 4 o’ clock in the afternoon, I was pointed south again and having to decide whether to stay on 101 and see some more nature or cut east to put myself closer to Seattle. At the advice of a gas station attendant in Port Angeles, I decided to continue on 101 and find a campsite somewhere north of Shelton. Surely the next day I would have heard from Seattle and could then get downtown via the ferry at the end of highway 3 in Bremerton. But the next morning, after camping just outside Hoodsport, I still had not heard from Seattle. I set off anyhow, figuring the day was still young.

By the time we pulled up to the ferry dock in Bremerton, though, it was nearly 1 o’ clock in the afternoon and I still had not heard from anyone. A few hours before, I had also sent out a message to friends somewhere in the vicinity of Vancouver and had not heard anything from them, either, and so I started to panic. I had wanted to save my Vancouver visit with friends Aman & Stephanie for as late as possible, because if I timed it right, I would also get to see my friend, Steve, on a visit from Mexico, but I decided I had to forgo that plan and just before the dock crew waved the lines of cars aboard the giant water craft, I sent out a message to Aman & Stephanie asking what they were doing that night and would it be terrible if I crashed into town?

By the time we had pulled out of the bay and I was on the top deck, taking in the view, I had messages back from both of them. Of course I could come see them; it would be great and we would go to a restaurant where Stephanie had a Groupon that needed using and oh yeah, here was their address with directions.

All weekend I had been rattling around like an empty can in the back of a pickup truck and finally, someone had picked me up.

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I got there, because when I was in Sonoma, Pomona told me that if I was driving up Coastal Hwy 1, I should pay Max a visit. While Pomona herself had not yet been to visit him and Jan, she said she knew that in their backyard, behind their large mobile home, they had parked a smaller one for guests, and so I agreed to let her get in touch with Max and Max agreed to host me and that’s how we left things. Between leaving Ben’s place in Cotati and arriving in Florence, though, I had to spend a night at a campsite and I ended up in a rather dismal place in a dark valley with one gas station, where a glum attendant humorlessly rang up my potato chip dinner. Having arrived by night, I checked myself in using the self-registration station and so by the time I left at dawn the next day, I had probably spoken 10 words in 36 hours. Thus, it was with great glee that I pulled into Max’s driveway and extended my hand in greeting to this stranger. He showed me my bunk for the night inside of a Toyota camper, much like Roxanne but a little newer and bigger— with a better rear axle, I might add. I set my things down inside and looked around with a contented sigh. Yes, this would do for a night.

That night, over Chinese food that Max deemed the best in town and something a little closer to authentic than your average fortune cookie joint, he told me about being born in China and then growing up in Taiwan. He was 25 when he moved to the States and had just finished his military service, as well as undergraduate school. In Cincinnati, he earned his Masters in electrical engineering and then moved to California to try for his doctorate but soon realized he was not cut out for that and settled instead for a job in Silicon Valley, where he spent the rest of his career until retirement. And somewhere along the way, he met Jan, an Englishwoman, who was in Oakland overseeing a renovation on their property while I was visiting.

Florence is not where they will end up forever, he said, but for now, it will do.

“Simple, unsophisticated and its main attraction is nature,” Max said. “And cheap.”

Because it’s in Oregon, for example, there is no sales tax. The cost of living is affordable, too, and gas is mandatory full service for less than the price of a gallon in California. There’s not a lot of culture, though. A small downtown on the water harbors a variety of restaurants and some shops, though Max wonders how anyone stays afloat, what with tourism being so thin, and then there is a wide beach for strolling, which is what we did the morning of the day I left, taking Rennie with us and letting him run free for awhile.

As we were driving back downtown for one last meal before I took off, Max made an abrupt U-turn.

“You shouldn’t leave Florence without seeing Rhody Drive,” he said.

That’s what they call Rhododendron Drive, where the rhododendrons come into bloom every year, drawing crowds of people to see them in their glory. Unfortunately, I missed it by a month or two but driving down the five or so miles of road, you could see all the empty green bushes packed into the brush and you could imagine how splendid it must be, all those colors bursting forth at once.

“How did they get here? Do you know?” I asked.

“How did they get here?” he said. “They’re just here, I think.”

Kind of like us.

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Oh, but first: brownie points if you know where the title of this post comes from.

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The wine got replaced. Ben and I walked around the corner to the local grocery store and he waited outside with Rennie while I picked out a different blend, maybe even a better one, and then I noticed some local cheeses from nearby Petaluma, so I added that to the bill, and then we walked back to the house, an ample place that forms a U with a central courtyard tucked into the crook and a large backyard directly across from it, just over the living room that connects this household of six that happily shares its space with outsiders. The night I was there, two Australian CouchSurfers were in town, and they were going to make spaghetti alla carbonara for everyone, once they got back from sightseeing in San Francisco, and the night before that, two of Ben’s friends had dropped in unannounced on their way back to Oakland, and there had apparently been a cheerful, impromptu party surrounding their visit.

But the part I was talking about earlier, the scene in the kitchen, was what was so priceless. Picture Ben and I standing at the counter across from the sink, and we each have a glass of wine in our hands and there is a spread of local artisan cheeses, in addition to the two I had bought, and we don’t move from that position for an hour and a half as we talk about everything from a tour route he had just plotted out for his parents’ upcoming visit, to the people we know in common back in Athens, Ga., to being transient and how Ben has finally settled and how I am yearning to do so myself, to a cross-country biking trip he took several years ago, to the open people you meet on the road and the barriers people can put up in their everyday existence, to the lovely life he has discovered in California since leaving Georgia, to making homemade kombucha. And we are just sort of leaning against the cabinets, rather than sitting, while the level in the bottle is gradually shrinking and shrinking, and then, here’s the key part: in the background, coming from the sofa just beyond the wall, plays an acoustic Crosby-Stills-and-Nash-esque version of The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love,” over and over and over again as housemates Tom (or maybe it’s Thom) and Sarah (I don’t think it’s Sara) practice it, Tom strumming on the guitar and Sarah singing, trying to get a version they like to play in public.

And it is not annoying; I don’t mean to say that at all. It is, to be clear, comical and in the best possible meaning of the word, because it so wonderfully sums up the mood in the house: relaxed, easy tolerance and accepting love.

The next morning, as Ben and Sarah and I left the house at the same time, Ben and Sarah stopped at the door to look at the motionless, snoring lump on the sofa that had apparently appeared at some point after we had all gone to bed.

“Who is that?” one of them whispered to the other, who shrugged in reply.

Just another nomad in the night.

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My mom is, as Pomona puts it, her oldest living friend. That is: the friendship, not my mom, has seen some years. They lived in Paris, France, at the same time for about two years growing up, when both their families were in the military. Then they reunited back in Virginia sometime around high school age and managed to stay in touch ever since, despite Pomona’s moves to Maine, Colorado and British Columbia, because my mom has pretty much always stayed in the South. The first time we met that I can actually remember, I was about eight years-old and she and her husband at the time came to visit us at our home in Jacksonville, Fla., parking their camper in the driveway and sleeping there at night, after they had sat at our kitchen table inside and entertained us with stories all evening. And I remember someone had on a bright yellow T-shirt and there was a warm glow and lots of smiling and laughter.

I never saw her again after that night, though, and for the rest of my childhood, I grew up just hearing the name of Pony, as she is called by close friends, and seeing her handwriting on the beautiful homemade cards she would send my mom several times a year, and then there would be phone calls to catch up every once in awhile, but it was not until this past May that I actually saw Pomona again and it was because I had just flown into Atlanta, Ga., to pick up Marco, and Pomona was flying in about two hours after me to meet up with my mom for a girls’ trip to Paris a few days later, and so my parents came to the airport and scooped us both up and took us out to eat and then back to their place in Athens, where I spent one night before heading out the next day in my new wheels, West bound again.

Now the Paris trip has since been completed and Pomona, widowed last year for the second time in her life, has returned to her old home on Vancouver Island, packed up her things and moved south to California, which is where I found her, standing at the end of her driveway and gazing up the road in the direction from which I was coming.

Before Pomona left Canada, her students put together a packet of gift certificates for her to use when she arrived in Sonoma and so the first thing she wanted to do was use one of them at a local winery. We drove over and shared a wine tasting, and after deciding the Pinot Noir was the best of the lot, we took a bottle back home to split in the garden, where we ate homemade vegetable soup with tofu on toast, and I listened to stories about the men she’d loved and the ones she had not loved, and how motherhood will change you in ways you can never predict, and how she had lived for two and a half years in a commune on the sea outside New Haven, Conn., with a fluctuating cast of 12 adults and her young son. During the summers, she said, they had to move to the vacated student housing at Yale, because the family who owned the house on the sea came to vacation, and so she saw a grittier side of life that a friend from those days would, years later, call a war zone.

“The police against the poor people against the black people against the hippy people. Then the blacks against the whites and there was, in that city, a lot of drugs. They were everywhere visible, people shooting up, selling on the street,” she said. “There was, I would say, a lot of degeneracy. A lot of social breakdown.”

But what fascinated her, she said, was that despite it being the ghetto, things still functioned, neighbor to neighbor.

“They actually were caring and held up social structure,” she said, “even though the culture at large had fallen apart.”

At the Chinese-Jewish delicatessen where she worked, she said, she would be alone, closing up at 10 o’ clock each night, and druggies would come in.

“And I would have people come in and, like, pee in the tofu, they were so completely out of their heads,” she said. “And that was common. I’m not kidding.”

Did she learn anything about herself? No, she said, because she was too busy getting by, which is what she said is true of anyone living in a marginal or dangerous community.

“Individuals don’t get to develop,” she said. “They’re too busy surviving.”

And so she moved to Maine with Russell, the man I would one day meet, who would become her second husband, and she said she found an entirely different culture, one where the individual was supported.

“Everybody was valued and everybody knew the same language, culturally,” she said, “so it was a place where I could rest and look at myself instead of always running down the street, looking over my shoulder.”

It was an old way, she said— one created by our Founding Fathers of this country, one where community comes first.

“But I think anytime you have a life that’s hard by nature, not by human politics, but by nature, you get a very strong person— you know, whether it be Northern Scotland or any of those places on Earth where you have to mind your Ps and Qs to get through the winter,” she said. “It makes for intelligent people, who must care about each other because their survival depends on each other. Even the town drunk.”

There were a couple of brothers in their town of Surrey, for example, and to her, she said, they were repulsive.

“Pig-headed, drunk all day long, sort of aggressive, arrogant, stupid— just stupid men. Stupid,” she said. “And I looked down on them, personally.”

That was when she first got to town, before she ended up staying for 20 years.

“And as the years went on, I realized that my neighbors didn’t look down on them,” she said. “They understood who they were. I wouldn’t say they respected them. But they valued them, because they were human and they were their neighbor and they had a place in the community. The drunkard has a place in the community, because he might save your life one day.”

I said that when I lived on Isla Mujeres in Mexico, I had that same sense of not being able to hide from anyone and having to face myself, because there, you have to go to the grocery store and expect to see all these people you know, and you have to go to the bank and expect it to be a big social affair, and you have to say Hi when you are not always in the mood to say Hi to people.

“And it just has a big effect on community,” I said. “And it has a big effect on your social skills and just living outside yourself.”

“Exactly,” she said. “It’s being not selfish, being disciplined. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to be cordial. It’s being responsible.”

I said that in the suburbs, you get away with a lot.

“Yeah, and it’s unfortunate,” she said, “because when you get away with it, you don’t grow.”

A few days later, I was talking to my mom on the phone and she wanted to know how my visit with Pony had gone and I said that it was great, that I had loved hanging out with her as an adult and that we had gone to the winery and the next day, we had taken a picnic to the park with Rennie.

Then there was a long pause on the line as I tried to think of the word to describe her.

“Not calm,” I said. “That’s not right but she’s very spiritual.”

“Centered,” my mom said. “She’s a very centered person.”

Yes, that was it. That was exactly the word I was searching for.

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I wanted to hear more about their Mexico trip, after they left the island and went to see some ruins in Tulum and some flamingos in Rio Lagartos. Next they wanted to hear about my trip thus far, since getting back to the country in early July. Then a chill set into the air and we grabbed blankets and moved to their other deck to have dinner and keep talking, this time about life in Los Angeles. DJ is from there but Susan is a transplant from New York, though by now, having spent so many years on the West Coast, you can’t tell. Four seasons, for example: she doesn’t miss them anymore.

Life is definitely different, though, they both admitted. Dating, for example, is a science— well, geography, to be specific. If someone lives in one part of Los Angeles, say in Marina del Rey, and you’re in another, for example, Burbank, you are likely not going to even give it a shot.

“Yeah, you just don’t do it,” Susan said.

The other thing is that no one does after-hours events, because everything is so far apart and because you have to drive yourself home afterwards.

“No one wants to get a DUI,” DJ said.

“It’s not like New York, where you pop out of work and you say, ‘We’re going two doors down, everybody’s having one beer and then you disperse,’” Susan said. “I think it makes it a lot harder.”

“It’s just a lot harder to meet people in a big, spread out city like LA,” he said.

It’s very car-based, I said, and Susan agreed. When I was in New York City, it took a lot of coordination to see my various friends over the course of nine days, because they are not all central to one spot, either, but I said that the subway made it easier. Basically, to spend that commute time on public transportation is always so much nicer, allowing you to do something other than focus on the unmoving road in front of you.

Doing the drive that afternoon to get to DJ and Susan’s place was fine, I said, because it was a one-time deal.

“But I was like, ‘I cannot imagine doing this every day, twice a day,’” I said.

“It’s a drag,” Susan said.

Their friend next-door does it daily and does not get home till 8:30 every night.

“And then you’re right,” she said. “You’re not going to say, ‘Okay, I’ll meet you at nine o’ clock for dinner’ or ‘Let’s go see a movie, because you’re back gearing up for the next day.’ ”

Plus, I added, I had heard it was an early town where people go to bed early and get up early, because they want to exercise before they have to be on a movie set at 5:30 or 6 in the morning, to which Susan agreed.

“I would say that people are healthier here, as a whole,” she said. “I mean, because it’s so outdoors. You know, you can find some good New Yorkers with a good smoker’s accent. They’ve been out late (insert growly impersonation), coffee and cigarettes. You don’t see that so much here, that kind of haggard, tired look. Good time. But they eat better. They’re just a little bit healthier in that way.”

Because you can’t get everything you want in one place. There is, at some point, going to be a compromise.

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“What should your pseudonym be then?” I asked.

“Don’t they say it has to be something like the name of your first dog and the first street you lived on for, like, your porn name?” she asked. “So I’d be Snoopy Horseshoe.”

Which is what we’re going to call her.

I hung out with Snoopy Horseshoe for a few days and it just so happened that I was there at a good time, because in addition to Monday’s taping, I also got to attend a picnic for which she had tickets and thus got to see the Hollywood Bowl, which I am sure I never would have done otherwise. It was hosted in part by Venice magazine and there was an open bar and all sorts of food to sample from area restaurants, and after a few hours of lounging around and eating and drinking in a little grassy park, we wandered up the hill to the stunning amphitheater, where we listened to Tchaikovsky, performed by the Los Angeles Orchestra.

The next day, Snoopy Horseshoe was in charge of showing a group of international visitors around as part of the sister city program that Burbank does with Solna, Sweden; Ota, Japan; Incheon, Korea and Gaborone, Botswana, and because Snoopy Horseshoe is so proud of where she lives, she had enthusiastically planned a full day of activities, loading us onto a city bus and taking us inside the gates of the Los Angeles Equestrian Center that was built for the 1984 Olympic Games, then up to Starlight Bowl, where you can look out over Burbank and see how big the city of 100,000 people really is, then down again to eat at Porto’s cuban restaurant and bakery, where they took us in the back and showed us how to make cakes as pretty as theirs, and then over to the Autry National Center, where a museum on Western heritage educates the public on the founding of the West and the long and complicated relationship between the U.S. government, the cowboys and the Native Americans.

Burbank got its start in 1911, meaning it just turned 100 this year. It started around a bunch of orange groves, followed by the start of an industry manufacturing airplanes that boomed during World War II, finally coming to an end in 1992. These days, it’s full of studios: Disney, Warner Bros, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, to name a few. And it has a chill vibe to it that feels completely separate from the rest of Los Angeles County. One college kid I talked to is from there and said that there is a saying, something to the effect of “Born in Burbank, always in Burbank.” I am not sure about that but I could understand the draw; it’s shady and surrounded by mountains, while still being central to the rest of the city.

I had to bow out for the last part of Snoopy Horseshoe’s tour, which went inside the new water and power plant of Burbank, and it seemed an unfortunate thing to miss but I was trying to get out of there before rush hour started. In the end, it didn’t matter, because I merged onto the expressway right at 5 o’ clock and thus endured my first-ever real life Los Angeles traffic jam. It took a little more than an hour to go 20 miles, which I suppose is not bad, by LA standards. I mean, I am sure it could have been worse but I don’t really need to know, to be honest.

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We walked to the beach, which is right down the street from their house, and we let Rennie run around like a crazy man, blowing off the steam he had accumulated all weekend, staying cooped up in the hotel room, save for the times I would break away from the conference to walk him around the park. There’s a pier that basically creates the border between Marina del Rey and Venice Beach, so we walked to the end of it, standing in the waning light with all the fishermen parked there, waiting to see if they would catch anything. Then one of the lines grew taut and it looked like the woman to whom it belonged had really got something huge.

“I hope it’s a shark,” Vic said, as we watched her struggle with the line.

But in the end, the hook had simply got caught up on the pier and had to be untangled.

We wandered into downtown, where crowds were gathering at the various watering holes and restaurants, and found an outdoor table at a cantina, where we could have Rennie at our feet and cold drinks in our hands. The tacos were okay but the company was better, and I heard about life in Los Angeles, a place that Christine said she never ever imagined she would live. Once she had decided to go to film school to learn about writing, though, it made sense to be there and then Vic was able to find a job at Investors Business Daily newspaper, thus staying in his journalism field.

It was different in LA. Manners were not the same. Driving distances between friends were huge. Traffic could be insane, not that either of their commutes are more than 10 minutes long. But it was a beautiful place to call home at the marina and they would continue to do so for at least two years, giving Vic time to finish studying for his Masters in business, which he is doing now, between hours at the paper.

Then what? Who knows? They’ll figure that out when they have to. In the meantime, they’ll just enjoy what they have. I mean, look at it. It’s gorgeous.

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“There are a lot of people awake at 1 in the morning,” Bonnie said.

And she was right. Little did we know, it was setting the tone for the rest of the weekend, which really, is best summed up in photos, because even though I did tweet a little bit, there was just so much going on and it was all so completely outside my usual realm of reality, I spent most of the three days pretty much stunned into silence, just trying to take it all in. See if you can make anything of it.

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Regardless, it still stands that it had been awhile since I had seen or even really talked to Gus— probably around nine or 10 years. Since then, he has met and married his wife, Sarah, and they moved to Santa Ana, Calif., where they are starting their fifth year, and while neither wants to stay forever, at the moment, it is allowing Gus to pursue his doctorate in the department of molecular biology and biochemistry at the University of California Irvine. Without getting too technical, the major focus of his lab is to genetically engineer mosquitoes so that they do not transmit dengue fever or malaria.

Sarah, on the other hand, is a psychologist in a maximum security prison about four hours from their apartment in Santa Ana, Calif., meaning she has to spend most of the week away from home, renting a room in a house near the prison and working four 10-hour days to make for a three-day weekend. I got to meet her for about an hour over dinner, before she had to drive out to her site, thus leaving Gus and I for three days to catch up on all that’s happened since we last saw one another— whenever that was exactly.

When I found out that Gus and Sarah lived in Santa Ana, I immediately thought about those winds with the same namesake that apparently make people go crazy but Gus told me that they were not that close, that you would have to drive out to the range to feel them. Something else I was curious about that did turn out to be close to their house, though, was In-and-Out Burger. There was all this fuss surrounding the fast food franchise and I had been hearing about it for years— one of those exclusive West Coast things that us Easterners would never know about, unless we made the trek to find out. Then when I was in Texas, one opened up close to where I was visiting and apparently people waited in line for hours to get in and there was crying and hysteria and I figured it must be amazing to garner that kind of attention, though I also knew somewhere in the back of my mind that people can be insane and totally blow things like that out of proportion.

“It’s a freakin’ burger,” Gus said, when we talked about it later. “It’s not going to change your life.”

He, too, had heard the hype before he tried it and said he was a little disappointed after his virgin visit. That said, he admitted that he has since become a fan and that he even craves it on occasion. And there are some good things to note about the business model, he added: they never use frozen meat; everything is fresh, including the hand-cut fries that come from potatoes chopped that day; it’s family-owned and operated; they have relations with particular ranches, which is why they have not spread much farther than the borders of California, because the meat has to travel from the ranch to any of the chain restaurants in a single day.

In the end, I went for the vegetarian option and just tried a bite of Gus’s. And it was good. I give it that. Then we moved on, driving across town to photograph some old World War II-era hangars that apparently used to house submarine-hunting aircraft. Across the street was a Costco and Gus wanted to pick up a bottle of his favorite whiskey and so as we were walking inside the store, he said: “I’m like sort of obsessed with the zombie apocalypse.”

“Do you like The Bloggess?” I asked. “Do you follow her, how she’s always sort of making fun of it but almost not making fun of it, like you get the feeling she half-believes it?”

“I don’t. Well, yeah. That’s kind of how I—”

“You really think there’s going to be a zombie apocalypse?” I asked.

“No. Well. I dunno,” he said. “It’s scary how close we already are. Like the rabies virus, when you think about it. Think about what it does to a raccoon. Another raccoon has bitten it. It infects the brain and changes the brain chemistry such that this animal is incredibly pissed off and it just wants to bite whatever it’s around. And it downgrades the pain sensors so you can beat the crap out of this thing with a tire iron all day long, break its legs, and it’s still going.”

“And then if we had rabies, we’d be doing the same thing?”

“Pretty much. Yeah. I don’t exactly know how it affects us, whether it’s the rage-frothy-mouth stuff or just straight up death,” he said. “It’s a little scary to me how little it seems you would have to change for the rabies virus to end up being—”

And then he cut himself off, ending with: “I think it’s just a fun culture, a fun thing to think about.”

Later, his scientist friend, Will came over for dinner and afterwards, while we were sitting on the back porch and they were teaching me to pack tobacco into a pipe and smoke it, I said: “So, let’s talk about the zombie apocalypse.”

“I’m so unprepared,” Will said. “I’m so jealous of Gus’s new acquire.”

“I just bought a new gun,” Gus said. “A 22 that looks like an M-16. But it’s a little 22 rifle. And it’s not for the zombies.”

Some friends of theirs have guns, he said, and they drove up to some national land, where you can legally shoot against a hill.

“And I’ve shot guns before,” he said. “But we had a bunch of different types of guns and I thought, ‘Wow. This is fun. I never ever ever ever want to use this on a person but—’ ”

“Zombies aren’t people,” Will said.

“Zombies aren’t people,” Gus agreed. “And it’s a decent rifle against the zombie because if you get it in the head at all, it doesn’t exit. It just bounces around, so it takes care of the brain and they’re down. Not that I’ve thought about that much.”

But the next day, after we had gone kayaking in the setting sun of Newport Bay, Gus commented on how many crabs he had seen on the banks of the estuary, and how big they were, and how actually, they would come in very handy as a food source, in the event of a, you know, apocalypse. Not that he was thinking about it.

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It was hot there. Make no mistake that what they say about the heat is true; it’s every bit as scorching as it’s reported to be. I was apparently lucky and it only reached about 110 degrees when I was there, compared to the possible 120 degrees that it can achieve. That does not matter so much when you are staying with friends who have air conditioning, though, as was the case with my friend, Carrie, who actually lives outside the central zone in a suburban part called Peoria. I arrived on my birthday and she already had plans to make me dinner that night. Her girlfriend, Zainub, was also going to come over and then we were going to hit the town, maybe dance somewhere.

But before all of that, Carrie and I had a lot to catch up on, because aside from my various changes in habitat and career over the last five years since we’d seen each other in Barcelona, where she had come to visit me, when I met her in 2003 at the newspaper where we were both reporters, as she joked, she was a straight Christian. Now, you could say, she had done a 180.

We talked about her coming out several years ago, how it was not a huge event; it just sort of happened. And we talked about Arizona, how you do not have to pass a driver’s safety course in order to get your license and how when you do get it, it’s valid for 40 years, meaning you could go blind in that time and no one would know. Then she told me how the state almost passed a law last year allowing college kids to have guns on campus.

“Because they seem to think that Virginia Tech wouldn’t have happened if there were more people with guns,” she said.

“Because everybody would just be shooting each other?” I asked.

“I suppose so.”

And we talked about how she might love the city more, if she lived downtown, as opposed to the outskirts, where retired people and snow birds flock, and where the houses all have nearly the same roof and identical rock gardens, instead of grass, and where there are not really any places for young people to hang out. That point was made especially clear on my last day there, when we went to the retro cool Clarendon Hotel and had a dip in the saltwater pool, before heading to the roof to watch the gorgeous sunset.

Yup, she said. This was going to be her new Saturday routine with Zainub. And maybe next time I came to visit, she would be living around the corner.

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I got there on Friday evening, having spent the day traversing Utah and passing most of the national parks that are there to see, because I was short on time and also because the state apparently does not let dogs traipse around the trails with you. I knew that this was not the case in Arizona, so I was planning to do a buzz by the Grand Canyon, but then, just as I was coming up on the road where I would have had to turn off to see it, I decided that I was ready to get to my destination already. I was finishing up my second full day in a row of nearly 500 miles each and my eyes hurt from all the sun and dust and dry air, and Rennie was pissed off that he had been so cooped up for so long, and well, I had seen the Grand Canyon already about 13 years ago and while I felt really bad for doing it, I drove right on by.

When I got to the apartment that Leah and Alex share with another guy, Jack, I made a beeline for the shower, while they hung out with Rennie, showing him around the pad and in the backyard, and giving him pats and rubs and scratches, and I laughed at Alex for having apologized in advance that his place was kind of humble. It was large and airy and very comfortable, and I reminded him again that I live out of my car right now, sometimes even sleeping in the backseat.

Then we headed downtown for some dinner at a local bar/restaurant/coffeehouse/music venue, and we sat in the cool air of the upstairs patio, listening to the live musicians and talking about our various adventures. But I think by the end of it, I was still not quite clear on what was going on: who was where and why or how. Nor did I know how to say Prescott exactly right.

The next morning, we took Rennie with us to another local eatery, one of the oldest in town, and it was my birthday, so Alex would not let me pay, and then we went wandering through town, passing through the main plaza, where something is usually happening, whether it’s an outdoor festival or just a bunch of friends hanging out on the grassy knoll in front of the courthouse, and we walked along the sidewalk graffiti diagram of the town’s history, reading how it got its start in 1581, some 300 years before Arizona was even a state. Then we made our way over to the studio at the Ecosa Institute, where Leah works in the office and where Alex is taking classes right now, and he showed me the projects he has been doing over the course of the 14-week program, which he still has about a month left to finish, and he explained how they have been learning about regenerative ecological design and some of the concepts that go with it, like creating buildings that collect rainwater and making sure that your yard creates a way for water to naturally flow from one plant to another, making the entire watering process more efficient, and I learned that students who do this one-time semester at the school can either earn a certificate that just proves they did it, or they can pay a little extra so that they can actually use it towards their college degree, which is what Alex is doing, because he started his college career in Michigan, which is where I met him when I was there almost a year ago, visiting his parents and taking part in the dragon boat racing competition that his dad, Sandy, was organizing.

What happened, though, is this: he was never really into that standard way of learning that so many institutes incorporate into their curriculum and at some point, he signed up for AmeriCorps in Seattle and then he met this cute girl, Leah, and they flirted around the topic for awhile, hanging out an awful lot but always just as friends, because technically, they were co-workers and it’s a little awkward to date your co-worker but finally, they confronted it head-on and fell right in love. Then Americorps was over, though, and it was back home for both of them, and Leah found a job in Prescott at the Ecosa Institute, where she had previously done this same semester that Alex is doing now, and meanwhile, Alex was home again, trying to concentrate on his studies, but it was not going very well at all for either one of them, because they missed each other so much, and so finally, earlier this year, Alex just up and moved to Prescott. He moved in with Leah and eventually, after a sort of lengthy search, found a job at a local coffee house and then he was able to enroll in Ecosa, which started in May. That will end soon, though, and then they have plans to pick up and drive to Seattle, turning it into a road trip that ends where it all began. Alex will do another year of AmeriCorps; he has his assignment already. Leah will have to find a job but she has already started looking and at the end of those 12 months, as is the agreement with AmeriCorps, Alex will have accrued another round of money to use towards college, bringing his balance up to $10,000. He will also have established residency in the state of Washington and can hopefully enroll at Evergreen, a sort of open-minded liberal arts and sciences school in Everett, where he thinks he might be better suited to learn.

And as I finally understood all the pieces and how they fit together, I realized that they were not nearly as complicated as I had originally thought, that it was just a wonderful love story about following your instincts and making things work, no matter how you have to shift things around, and how happiness is truly the best barometer for whether or not you are on the right track. And I had to smile, because I imagined that while trying to understand the situation, I had felt how some of you must feel sometimes, trying to keep up with this trip of mine: “You’re still in Athens why? And wait a minute; you haven’t left Austin yet? And Mexico— huh?”

Sometimes, you just have to actually walk the time line, point by point, to get it.

As for that whole biscuit-Prescott thing, here’s the deal: if you are a true local, you say it just like biscuit but with a PR instead of a B; if you just live there, you simply replace the final cott syllable with kit. And if you’re a total outsider and have no idea about any of that, you say it just like it looks, but I don’t recommend that.

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I got there on a drizzly, cool afternoon, almost evening, and driving up the dirt road to their house, I could only think of how grateful I was to have Marco and not Roxanne for this part of the trip. I had worn jeans, knowing that I would be leaving the heat of Denver and climbing to 9,000 feet, where the air would thin out a little and shorts would feel strange. John and Cayce had just returned from a weekend with friends at a wine and jazz festival, and I had stayed up late the night before playing games and drinking one too many, so all three of us were nursing hangovers but we managed to rally and stay up just late enough to sit around after dinner and talk. It was lovely— one of the nicest evenings I can remember in a long time.

Their house is a solid, comfortable, sort of timeless construction that they built with the help of an architect back in the late ‘90s. It sits on its perch overlooking the valley below and from their back porch, there is a nice view of Mt. Evans, one of the local “14ers” that you can drive up, if you’re not up for the hike.

Neither of them is from Colorado. He’s Pennsylvania; she’s Ohio. But they moved there together from where they had met in Florida about 30 years ago, just because they wanted to give it a go. They have been there ever since. You could say he stole her from her high school sweetheart— rode right in on his motorcycle and swept her off her feet. And to be around them now is to feel that they are no less in love today than they must have been back then.

Having raised two kids who are now in their early 20s and living on their own, they are empty-nesters and loving it. Winter in the mountains can be a little drab, so they have been managing to get out of it for a few months, taking trips down to Mexico, as they did this year for two months. One day, John said, this house will be too much to maintain and they will have to downsize but in the meantime, they have no plans to leave and neither would I, after having spent some time there.

The first morning I woke up to the sun blazing into my room and I thought I had slept in. It was 6:30. After a lumberjack breakfast, we hopped into Marco and took Rennie down the road a ways to find a trailhead, where we could tromp through the woods for a few hours. Then the afternoon storms were moving in, right on cue, and we sought cover in the small mountain town of Evergreen, holing up in a saloon for a pint and some nachos.

The sun was trying to come out again when moved on to the grocery store to get ingredients for chile rellenos, a recipe that none of us had ever made but were in the mood to learn how. By the time we got home again, the clouds were back and the rain settled in for the rest of the night, but it didn’t matter, because we had already planned to stay put, sitting in the hot tub, before cooking and drinking John’s famously strong margaritas. We tried to end the night on a more intellectual note with a game of Scrabble but that plan that was almost immediately vetoed, when we starting playing words like “run” and “fed,” and so we took the hint and all toddled off to bed, waking up the next day to a foggy mist, much like my head.

By the time I hit the road, though, the sky was clear and blue and perfect for another hike, this time around a canyon, before I drove on to Boulder to meet up with another friend, Kristina, who I had also met while in Mexico, also at my friend Steve’s place, and who I also barely knew. She has just moved there from Oakland, Calif., to be near her boyfriend, Scott, and so I caught her at a time of great transition, only three weeks into a new job, a new home and a new landscape. Something of a seaside girl, all these mountains are pretty, she said, but it’s going to take some getting used to. We found a perch by the window in a restaurant on Pearl Street and talked about it all: relationships, careers, changes, family. Then it was time to turn in for the evening because lightning was cresting over the mountains behind the city, getting ever closer with each electric blue flash, and besides, she had a 12-hour workday ahead of her, as did I, behind the wheel.

It was finally time to leave Colorado.

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Before I got there, he had told me to arrive with an appetite and so I did, nearly starving myself all day on that four-hour drive from Poncha Springs, which took me all around in back country, right over rivers, down switchbacks, past signs that warned of finding high ground during flash floods and not getting caught under falling rocks. Charred, leafless trees and new grass growth signaled that a forest fire had ripped through there not too long ago, taking out a few peaks in a single swipe, and at one point, I was even on a dirt road. Then, just as quickly, I was at a crossroads of highway and railroad tracks, turning left from small-town Sedalia and finding that I was on the home stretch to the capital city, taking the last few miles through suburban Littleton and then Englewood, before reaching the interstate and merging into the pack of cars out doing Saturday errands. When I did get to Ian’s, both he and I were almost fainting from hunger, so we made a beeline to The Ale House, just making it inside before the heavens opened up, dumping out rain and thunder and lightning. After ordering tall pints of microbrew and big burgers of bison, we were full and ready to go find some of his friends on a rooftop overlooking Broadway and the buildings of downtown, and underneath the orange glow of a stunning post-storm sunset, we celebrated his friend Liz’s arrival at 30.

Did I recall the name of the video game that we used to play that was like SimCity but not quite? And I could not remember it at all, only Prince of Persia, but I did have a fresh account of how we shot the air rifle off his back porch and how one night, I was trying to hit a leaf and so I shot and I think I got it. That part is a little fuzzy but then all of a sudden this spider in the foreground just starting spilling all of his guts in one, snot green gush of liquid. I had shot his butt off.

“Did you feel bad about killing the spider?”

“Yeah, I did,” I said.

The next morning over coffee, talk somehow turned to these television shows about natural disasters and how his younger brother in Montana talks about them a lot, informing Ian what can kill you when you perhaps least expect it— you know, your standard tsunami-earthquake-tornado scenario.

“So whaddah we got?” Ian asked of Denver. “We live under the world’s largest super volcano.”

Maybe not right under it but it’s true that Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming sits right on this great, big caldera under which flows a big, hot vat of molten lava. According to scientists, three times in the past 2.1 million years the volcano has blown up something big (a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helen in 1980) and if it were to blow like that again sometime soon, a lot of us would be toast. But what are the chances of that happening? Well, no one knows for sure but according to both those articles to which I just linked, the ground in the park has been steadily rising since 2004, signalling a surge of magma. Because it is still about six miles underground, though, and not, say, a quarter of a mile, no one is too concerned yet.

“I’m more nervous about the California earthquake thing, the 100-year earthquake thing,” Ian said. “They say we’re on borrowed time.”

“And I’m going there next,” I said. “I’m going to be spending quite a bit of time there.”

“You gotta be prepared,” he said, laughing. “Plan your evacuation route.”

In the meantime, I was more concerned about lightning. The storms have been rolling in every afternoon since I got to Colorado late last week and they come in fast, gliding over the mountain ranges so that you can see the rain about 10 minutes before it reaches you, and from these great, swelling, churning masses of steel gray clouds also shoots lightning— thick bolts that zap down to the earth in quick, jagged lines.

We stood there watching one come in as we waited in line to tour the Coors beer plant and we debated if it was worth sticking around. Thankfully, we had already completed a hike near Red Rocks Amphitheater that morning, which is how you have to do it in the summer out West, because you are either avoiding the heat or the storms, which are apparently more rampant now than ever. Ian said that he had never seen as much rain as they were getting so far this year.

In the end, we made it into the factory just fine and by the time we left an hour and a half (and six samples) later, everything was more than fine. Then we proceeded on to find another set of friends and the four of us went to a steakhouse, where we ordered more drinks and filled our bellies with food and got into a cut-throat round of Sorry, eventually taking the party home, where we could include Rennie and Ian’s dog, Dudley, and also go through a few more bottles of wine and more boardgames, until it was time to say Goodnight and the biggest danger facing us all at that moment was the hangover we were about to wake up to the next day, a state that could only be amended by large doses of coffee and grease.

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We climbed them, the wind pelting coarse grains at our faces and making tears stream out from our eyes, and I felt the sun grow hotter and hotter on my skin as I hiked ever closer to it, and it seemed like we were in a crazy dream, Rennie and I. The end of the earth. The beginning of time. The middle of nowhere. And after all that, we climbed back in Marco and I rolled the windows down and we drove straight across more valley, past a compound that boasted of summoning UFOs and then huge clusters of trailers and enormous empty plots of private land, and the air grew cooler and cooler and cooler, and the light stretched out and out and out, once high in the sky, then hiding behind the clouds until it was just an orange, glowing thing the crept down on the other side of the mountains that were in front of us, which we crossed, before settling into a motel room for the night, the first bed I had slept in since leaving Mexico.

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“I love the color of your legs. You’re almost the same color as me,” a man shouted from several feet away. “Come here. Let’s compare.”

“I don’t know,” I said, eyeing his dark brown skin. “I think you’ve got me beat.”

But he was insistent that we were the same color and he walked right up to me and pressed his hip next to mine so that our skin was touching and I laughed, because I looked positively jaundiced next to him but he was still impressed.

“How’d you do it?” he asked.

“Mexico.”

Wandering around the next bend, a man who looked like he could have been an extra in the movie Heidi, or maybe Indiana Jones, was walking towards me with a rather large dog, and so I did what I always do in such a situation: moved to the side, allowing the other person to pass me with a wide berth, so as not to allow Rennie to cause any problems.

“Oh, thank you. I was going to do that,” the man said as he got closer. “Six years ago, this one—”

But then I could not hear what he said regarding his dog, because both dogs started snarling at each other.

“He what?” I asked, turning back to the man, who had by now passed me.

“Treed. A. Bear.”

“Oh,” I said, and started laughing as I carried on down the street.

And then, not 10 steps later, a man sitting to the left with two pit bulls started admiring Rennie and he called him a girl, which I said happened all the time, because he is such a delicate young man, which is likely because he was only four months old when he got neutered, to which this guy responded that it was a shame he had been neutered, to which I responded that it was before I had adopted him but that I would have done the same, because you know, that’s what you do. But this guy said that it’s what lazy people do, because the alternative is to keep the dogs apart during certain times in their, er, reproductive phases. And I was just sort of quiet to that one, because it all sounded so New Age and outside anything that I wanted to know at that very moment. And then he almost convinced me to stick around Santa Fe for a second night, because the next night was when some of the galleries were open late for First Friday and the Georgia O’Keefe museum was free but then I kept walking, looking for dinner, and by the next morning, I had decided to keep moving, because the thing about traveling with a dog and staying at campsites during the heat of summer is that it’s hard to be a tourist. You have to do things during the day that are inclusive of your buddy, since you cannot leave him in the hot car, and I was pretty sure that I did not want to just wander the streets of Santa Fe all day, window shopping and sitting in shady spots, because Rennie is also rather intolerant of the heat, so even hiking somewhere in the area was out of the question. Basically, anything that did not involve air conditioning was out of the question.

But I liked the city. It had good vibes. It felt like a big small town, like the kind of place where you could just roll in one night, decided to settle down, get a random job at a random cafe, start making connections and find yourself still there, 10 years later. I had the feeling that if I did stick around, I would meet a lot of people and I would laugh a lot more than I already had in half an hour and that I might even stop getting my pets fixed, so I kept moving but not before having a lovely plate of mezze in a quiet courtyard on a side street that no one else seemed to know existed, and then waking up the next morning to take Rennie across the empty, four-lane highway in the early light of dawn, watching the sunrise over the mountains behind the city, which was nestled into the hills just like Easter eggs in a basket.

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My sister walked into the room and stood behind me, looking over my shoulder at what was happening. Forget Marfa, she said, because I was trying to make it work to stop in the little Texas artist community near the border with Mexico and it was clearly being forced. With a dog along for the ride, she said, it was going to be hard to see what needed to be seen there. Besides, once I cleared the state line at Arizona, there was a barrage of wild fires nearly blocking my path. Save Marfa for another day and go north, she said; go see my people in Colorado instead. It would be cooler up there and on the way, I could stop and see all sorts of amazing, dog-friendly national and state parks.

“And,” she added, “you get to see the transition from Texas into New Mexico.”

See it I did.

From the wide streets of Lubbock out to the even broader, open ranch lands, nothing but fields and fields of golden yellow, dotted by scrubby little bushes, all along the railroad tracks and through the tiny towns, grain elevator after grain elevator in Sweetwater, Sudan, Muleshoe and Farwell.

And then, just like that, no warning at all, I was in New Mexico, where the land ever so slightly changed, undulating up and down, taking me down to low spots and then thrusting me up again, laying out before me a huge bowl of colors and textures, the distant mesas no longer so distant. Shooting through tiny, pointed hills that crowded right up to the highway— the empty highway that cut right through it all, a ribbon of gray in a sea of mustard and pink and mauve and green. And the great blue sky overhead, once barely blemished by a single cloud, now covered in them.

Then out onto the interstate I went, and oh, it was unpleasant. I held my breath and chewed, like I used to do with Brussels sprouts when I was six, and an hour later, I had flown past all the semi trucks that crowded the right lane, and I had cleared it, finally merging off the expressway again and out onto the sweeping landscape, back onto the deserted highway. By now, the land was rising right up, no longer a subtle change from flat fields. There were actual mountains on the horizon, purple and gray and blue, and the heavens were filled with great massive shapes of white, some of them smeared on like paint, others barely stuck there, like cotton balls on velcro, and from the flat-bottomed ones dripped rain, falling down to the earth like tinsel

But I was still under the sun, driving in and out of shadows, watching how their patterns lined the valley floor like paisley, and thunder rumbled somewhere overhead and a wind blew and not too far away, just over that peak and around that bend, I knew, lay Santa Fe.

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Yes, it was a lovely day for a drive and now it’s a lovely evening for a sleep, but first, a few pictures.

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It was an excellent way to spend any afternoon, not just my country’s birthday— which happened to be the first for which I had actually been on American soil since 2005. But more than anything, it felt like the perfect way to spend the eve of my departure. At least, that’s what I thought yesterday. I woke up today intending to head out of town after breakfast, when I broke my blog with the irreversible click of a button. Trying to fix it set my whole morning behind several hours and when it started pushing lunchtime, I decided just to put the whole thing off another day. What’s 24 more hours, really?

In the meantime, while you wait for me to hit the road already, here are a few numbers to run through your head: since this trip began in Aug. 16, 2010, I have driven 11,711 miles, just over 9,000 of them in Roxanne and then another 1,700 in Marco, plus almost exactly 1,000 in borrowed vehicles— oh, wait! I forgot about the 300 miles from Edinburg to Austin in that rental car. Well, hell. That means I have officially done 12,000 miles of this trip, which is what the sticker that my brother-in-law designed for me said I would do.

But then if you’re also counting that I have flown 4,492 miles, then I have gone quite a bit over that original mileage prediction. I asked my sister if I should be counting air miles, too, and she said, “It’s your trip. You can do whatever you want.”

And I guess she’s right.

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