The Evergreen State

On what is supposed to be our second to last morning, I decide I’m done. No more hotels. No more road food. No more trip. We are driving through all the way to my parents’ house. It’s 11 hours of drive time, which I’ve done on plenty of other trips, but not with so many pets in tow. I know it’s going to be a long day, but I simply don’t care anymore. I. Am. Done.

With the car packed for the final time, we set off from Bozeman. I forget that we still have one time change ahead of us, but it works to our advantage. We should make it before the sun goes down, even if we stop a bunch of times along the way.

It’s not a bad drive. A little depressing as we cross from Montana’s 80 mph into Idaho’s much slower speeds, but we’re driving through a short part of the state. Finally, after half the day is gone, we see the border of Washington ahead. Mr. C snaps one last welcome sign for our final state and we’re in.

When people think of Washington State, they’re really thinking of the green, rainy western half. Eastern Washington is dry, open farmland. Our welcome back to Washington is sunny and warm.

Finally, after many hours, we can see the first layer of the Cascade Mountain Range in the distance. It doesn’t look so sunny and warm ahead. The clouds have obscured all but the very tops of the mountains and it looks like it could be raining. Strangely enough, in all of my imaginings about returning to the Seattle area, it never occurred to me that it might be raining when we arrived. Seriously, folks. Not once.

We do get a break in the clouds for a moment as we’re nearing the pass, just enough for a beautiful welcoming beam of light to shine down on us. We’re back and we’re so happy that we’re giddy.

The sun is just starting to set when we’re twenty minutes away from our final destination. The sky is touched with gold and the edges of the clouds are etched orange. Every curve in the road brings memories of our past. Every hill summited exposes another familiar place. We are almost done. We’ve made it.

In the end, we travel for exactly three weeks, drive about 4,500 miles, and see more amazing things than we can count. We drive in seventeen states: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, five of which are new states for both of us.

It was certainly an adventure from start to finish. There were so many highlights, places and experiences that will forever burn in my memory. Eating cheesesteaks in Philly, climbing the glacial rocks in Central Park one last time, waiting inside Sears with all of the pets while our tires were replaced, Mr. C climbing the big Sing the Queen City sign in Cincinnati, those delicious ribs in St. Louis, spending time with the cousins, Carhenge, the big male buffalo crossing the road, the meditating bear, Devil’s Tower, truffles in Deadwood, hiking at Mt. Rushmore, a freak gust of wind that made our hair stand on end while driving to North Dakota, and the sunset filled final ten minutes of our drive.

There are silly things that will stick with me forever too. Some truly clumsy moments that we now laugh about. Case in point, apparently our car has very skinny spaces between the seats and doors. So skinny that even Mr. C can’t slip his hand in to grab things that drop down there. And, this hole doesn’t open up under the seats. If stuff falls down there you have to find a way to fish it out; there is no other way. We didn’t know this before our trip. We learned it the hard way. Over and over and over again. First, he dropped my mobile phone down there while we were stopped for gas. Twenty minutes later we were finally able to continue on our way. A few days later it was his orthodontic bite plate. Let me tell you, he was ready to freak out, especially when I started laughing that he’d dropped yet another thing down the rabbit hole. I stopped laughing after about 30 minutes. Another day, when we were in a drive thru, my credit card flipped out of my hand and went right down the side. Good thing I carry cash! We ultimately blocked the spaces with anything we could find, bunches of napkins, paper sacks, towels, you name it we stuffed it in there. Then, at our last hotel, on our last morning, we were coming back to our room to get the last load of junk. We had two card keys. The first wouldn’t open the door, so Mr. C pulled the extra out of my hand and promptly dropped it. Somehow, and I still don’t understand how he managed this, it slid right under the locked door of our room. Cool trick, right? Right.

As the years pass and the endless hours spent in the car become nothing but a fuzzy recollection, the highlights and the crazy stuff will rise to the surface and become the go to memories for us whenever we need a smile. We will spin tall tales of our time crossing the country as mother and son. When Barnaby and Jasper and Watson are long gone, we’ll deal these memories out like cards so that we can hold them in our hands once more.

We did it. And we did it the right way. We saw some of the greatest destinations our country has to offer. And we made sure to stop to see some of the weird things too. We tried local foods like Funny Cake in Pennsylvania. We talked to fabulous people everywhere we went. We visited some of our very own important people along the way.

A newly single mom, her twelve-year-old son, two Corgis and a cat-in-a-backpack went on an adventure together. And it was magical.