We are Home

Yesterday afternoon we pulled into our driveway after 12 days on the road, covering some 3500 miles. We tried to remember the last road trip like this that we took. Maybe never. Shorter ones, for sure, but recently most of our traveling has been by air. Even more recently most of our travel has been non-existent. It has been a few years of holding down the fort at home and watching our finances. Spring rolled around—sort of—our old house finally sold, and it seemed like something we needed. We had plans to go to Santa Fe in the past and something else always came up and we didn't get there. So the new plan was a big loop through the west, with Santa Fe holding down the far end of the loop and whatever fell along that oval path going and coming back. Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, California—Oregon again.

I'm still unpacking, doing laundry, shuffling through the piles of stuff. I haven't even started going through my photos yet, but I did download the one above, taken in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California several days ago. I made Ray stop the car out in the middle of nowhere so I could take a picture of that vast expanse and those snow-capped mountains and that one moment of my life in June of 2011. We were on the last part of our trip, heading toward home. I was clicking through pictures in my mind and attempting to make sense of all we had seen. I always find that traveling opens up a part of my brain that looks for patterns and truths in the experience of new landscape. Proust said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

I'll be sharing some of those new landscapes and perhaps what I saw through new eyes in the coming weeks. Right now I am too tired. Happy we went. Happy to be home.