For the last ten years, Tiffany has been cutting articles out of a variety of outdoorsy magazines like "Outside", "Backpacker", and "Hoofin' it" and filing them with a 3-hole punch into a binder. At last, on this trip she has had a chance to prove wrong my assertions that she's the granola equivalent of a coupon-cutting housewife. thanks to her diligent dewey decimalism, we found out about a place in wyoming called Bighorn. For all i know, everyone else has heard of this place already but according to Tiffany's sources, it is often overlooked due to it's proximity to Yellowstone and Glacier.
(picture: if you look closely you can see the rig nestled amongst the horse trailers)


Travis, if you're out there, forgive me for this, but we drug the airstream up a 7% grade (had to pull over and vent the engine after the wiper fluid started boiling and spraying out of the wipers) and through the woods on a trail fit more for horses than trailers. Once we started we had to keep going because there sure wasn't any place to turn around. Eventually we made it to the trail head and after some deep-breathing exercises got ourselves ready for a hike up into the mountains.



The bighorn landscape varied from rugged stone outcroppings to western mountain streams and meadows. Nala frolicked appropriately. I hauled the cheese disposal up the trail and Tiff reminded me that we would have never been here if not for her binder.

From here we headed into Bozeman for some hotel pool action. Bozeman's got plenty of style and some good eating. The locals all look like they just wound down from a tough shoot for the patagonia catalog. Sasha loved the hotel and after a night of wandering downtown, Tiff and I found her so asleep on the hotel bed that she didn't realize we'd come home.

i'm sure the badlands came by their name honestly enough. get rid of the roads, cold beer, and perfect weather and the place could be a real nightmare (especially if the beer was warm). but after a wet spring with a cool tailwind on a bicycle followed by a couple of hot blonds, the badlands are double sixes on a paradice.

this has turned out to be an incredible time to be up north; everything is grassy green and there has been enough rain to produce a bumper crop of wildflowers that are pleasantly incongruous with the harsh western scenery.

it's always a pleasure to see tiff's maternal instincts emerge. sliding down a loose trail with stella strapped to her back and playing next to the "beware of rattlers" sign shows me a new softness i'd never seen in my wife before.

the homing pigeons are racing tonight
intuition alone
shelters their flight
the shaman corks his bottles of thunder
and knows what grows
if you plow your name under
the weaver unravels the work that she'd done
then hums a hum
patient her lover will come
the doctor checks his pulse at the door
rings the bell
and dives for the floor
the gardener waters and waits
pruning his worries
and weeding his fates
the boxer swings and knocks himself out
and swears to his wife
that inside is out
the policeman's locked in the slammer
but plots his escape
with his grandfathers hammer
the sweeps and the swallows consider their fate
the students are seated
but the teacher is late
the homing pigeons are racing tonight
intuition alone
shelters their flight

this is apparently what things look like from stella's angle. this is a picture she took while playing with my phone. notice the subtle postmodern. underpinnings of the perspective contrasted with the abstracted photorealism in the composition of the piece. i would have used a different f-stop but she says she shoots what she feels.

so far so good; madison deserves the cool bike-friendly reputation it has. we were able to start far out of town in a nice park and ride paved pretty trails to the center of town for a fine meal at a brewery. the sashimi and cranberry mustard were tasty enough to make all of the "yah sure", "you betcha", and "don't you know" commentary of northerners seem sincere and welcoming. normally, being the capital city of a state makes it as cool and hip as being the president of the high school chess club, but madison has a vibrant pedestrian and bike-welcoming downtown surrounding the hilltop capital building. someone even left some pro-bike pamphlets shoved under our brake cables. (although, truth be told, there's always something unnerving about agreeable propaganda.)

after madison we finally made it across the mississippi (thank god for spell-checkers) and are officially, if only mildly, WEST. we camped 600 feet above the river on some bluffs and went for a hike this morning before heading west to sioux falls, south dakota for a walk and some food. (guacamole, olive salsa, and sangria for the foodies out there.) we've been trying to coordinate driving with stella's naptimes with a decent amount of success. her carseat in the van faces the dogs and she has learned to stick out her tongue and pant at them. this is amusing in the van, but seems disconcerting to passersby in the street when they get enthusiastically panted at by a baby.


it occurred to me today that this is the first time in my life i've gone somewhere with no real definite plan about when i'm coming back. we've been planning and working our hineys (hinies? high-knees?) off for a year to make this happen but we really don't have much in the way of plans once we get there. i'm committed to 9 shifts a month in albany but other than that we don't have much that we're obligated to. we still haven't figured out exactly where we are going to stay but i don't even know if there's a good reason to stay anywhere. we got a PO box so that the IRS could waste some paper at us, but other than that we may just go ahead and keep in wander-mode for a bit; we seem to be getting the hang of it and my brain feels a lot more active for having all of the new stimuli that the last couple of months have offered.

i'd like to add a bunch more pictures but rural south dakota has about as much band width as a mosquito leg.

after 2 months of goodbye parties we are as fattened and polished with well-wishing and cookouts as any sacrificial virgin that ever got flung into a volcano and at 5 pm today we put on our asbestos panties took the plunge. as i write this we are passing the jeweled luminescent lego set of Chicago's night-time skyline after suffering through the moldy pancake that is northern indiana. with forty feet of diesel burnin' land yacht and tiff at the helm we could be the poster for "squeaky and the bandit." stella finally lost a long battle with consciousness and her cheeks are jiggling like santa's ass on a corrugated tin roof. neither tiff or i have been able to sum up our feelings very well at this point. i feel like we're half-way through a health club smoothie; it tastes a little nasty but it's probably good for us and for the price we're damn well gonna finish it. we're hoping to make it to madison wisconsin tonight and head west from there on the northern route. the last time i came this way was on a cross country honeymoon bicycle trip. now 10 years later and with fourteen thousand pounds more stuff (including 20 pounds of cheese-fed baby) i'm looking for the next thing, whatever that might be. between tiff and i, i'm sure we've had several hundred conversations with friends and family about why we're leaving and i think we've managed to come up with a different answer each time.

my turn to drive...

Movin' on up...

Bowling is a sport. If this statement seems reasonable to you, then you probably are unsurprised by the fact that RV parks are indicated on maps as "campgrounds". Living in an RV park is actually a lot like camping except for the air conditioning, refrigerator, stereo, oven, showers, laundry room, pool and high-speed internet connection. For the last few weeks Tiffany and I have both been unemployed ( Stella is still working around the clock at being a tiny little trainwreck with a pinch of tornado) and living in the trailer. We kicked off our jobless adventuring with a trip to Nashville to celebrate Dr Joe's release from prison (he was sentenced to 9 years of residency after med school for being smart enough to be a plastic surgeon). In addition to being a surgeon Joe also works part time as a rep for Bacchus, greek god of wine, women, and song. True to his style, he and his comrades took over the penthouse suite of a hotel in downtown Nashville for an evening of drinking, dancing and generalized merriment. This gave Tiffany and I a chance to recreate "The Jeffersons" in a single evening by getting ready for the party at the trailer park and heading to the hotel for some fancy high-rollin' until the sun came up.

{picture: view from the party pad}


Stella Firefly Short was born in our bathroom in Lexington one year ago. I had come home from work after a night shift as Tiff was getting out of bed and she said, "I think my water just broke but you should go ahead and get some sleep because we've got a while." This statement reinforces my belief that all pregnant women are beautiful and stark-raving mad. Obviously things went well but not without the steady calm guidance of our midwife, Linda Blue and the mellow joy of my mother. I knew that Stella would come into the world surrounded by friends and family but I didn't realize that her arrival would also blur the lines between the two. Since Stella was born, Linda has become family and Stella always puts on her best manners when she sees her. Linda is headed around the world soon, because like any superhero her path is guided by a mixture of the whimsy of fate and the needs of others. She made our weekend in Nashville possible by coming along and keeping an eye on Stella and we couldn't have done it without her.

{picture: the late night impromptu dance floor}