withoutwhatifs

It’s been awhile since either Derek or I posted anything on our blog, so we’re going to do our best to pick up somewhat where we left off and get back on track, and in the meantime I wanted to just write a quick update of where we’ve been since early October. The purpose of us writing this to begin with was that we thought it would be easier than trying to call or email our families and to let everyone know we were still kicking around and hadn’t been abducted or fallen off a cliff, but we quickly learned that while it is more efficient, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to maintain a blog and it’s more time consuming than we anticipated. Both of us enjoy writing, but uploading photos, finding reliable internet, and the general carving out of time in our day to do it, when we’d rather be outside exploring, reading a book, or just not in front of a laptop, well it’s been hard to make it our top priority. But the other thing we found is that unintentionally, we now have this experience documented for ourselves to keep and look back on, to remind us of the names of places, trails and breweries, or stories we might’ve otherwise forgotten. And so at this point, it’s more for that reason that we both want to write about our last few weeks on the road, and not leave any loose ends, which we’ll be attempting to do over the next few days.

Since we left Colorado, we made our way through New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. (The photo at the top of this blog post is from a little bar in Luckenbach, in Texas hill country, population of 3…more on that later.)  And after a few fun and boozy days in New Orleans, we drove through Mississippi and Alabama, spending last night camping in northern Georgia and making our way to Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee/North Carolina as I write this. The last few weeks have been so much fun – meeting up with family and friends, and getting to share a lot of our experiences with people we haven’t seen in awhile. But it’s also been a whirlwind, so we’re going to use these next few days in the mountains, and what will likely be our last real camping before heading back to Massachusetts, to enjoy the quiet of the outdoors, hopefully do some blogging, and try to digest everything before we go back to reality.

Stay tuned.