Honeymoon

I was thinking that today would be the first day of the count-down to the finish-line, after getting through the middle of the trip, and getting closer to the destination.
Also, today was scheduled to be one of the longest drives of the trip (discarding the flat tire incident), so the initial mindset was not 100% positive.

Things turned out to be different. We started off in a cold and crispy September-summer morning, with an incredibly beautiful landscape of Montana.
My wife had some Starbucks coffee, which also helped to set a good mindset early in the morning :-)

As the day progressed, I never thought about the count-down anymore, and was just engaged in the moment(s), spending another day with my wife with a wonderful backdrop of views, landscapes and picture-perfect scenery's. It made me think of honeymoon, even though I never had one.

Maybe this trip can be classified as one (I am sure Alexandra will claim that she needs an official honeymoon, but that is another story...). I am spending 24/7 with her, and we are doing this for a total of 7 days. We have never done this!!!
I can recommend to every couple to do this, because it is turning out to be a wonderful experience, despite the tough waking-up schedule, driving schedule, dog-maintenance-schedule, hotel-experiences, daily load and unload, junk-food, etc.

It is wonderful, and I started to think that I will be a little sad when it is all over...
How strange: I started the trip thinking it would be a tough undertaking, and now, I start thinking the opposite.

Even the greyhounds are starting to adjust to the ever-changing environment, and are starting to realize the daily sleep-overs are safe. The 24/7 time spent with them also allows me to bond a little bit more with Lady, who is always so difficult to relax. The two of them also bond as they spend a lot of time in the car, where physical contact is difficult to avoid: they almost always touch each other, whereas at home, they don't seem to be close to each other at all. At least not when we're around...

I know I wrote about solitude yesterday, and am writing about honeymoons today, which is quite conflicting, but that is the nature of the human mind. Contemplating, thinking, wondering, estimating, guessing and elaborating. Or maybe it is a Belgian thing...

Enough for now:
* Yellowstone is amazing: Everyone should visit it once in their lifetime.
* Montana is beautiful: I should have bought a couple of hats and boots. And maybe I should organize an official honeymoon there: just to make her happy and avoid all future references to a 'never had honeymoon'. I have to be careful though; maybe I'll lose her to one of those good-looking cowboys she craves for...

I love Montana

Today was a humbling day. Nature can have this effect on people. Whenever I go to such an astounding place, I feel very small, I realize that my problems are insignificant before such magnificency and perfection such as Mother Nature.

Montana is THE state so far. It is even more beautiful than I expected it to be. We started the day with bright sun and blue sky, moved into fog (to the point we could see a few feet ahead of us) and then cloudy. The we started going higher and higher and higher and the sun shone bright and clear again.

We stopped at a real road stop (not the McDonalds type) and everyone stopped talking as we walked in, like in a cowboy movie hehehe. The kitchen even had the old fashioned saloon doors.

Look at the hay rolls... We called them cow sushi (hehehe)

The open fields gave way to hills and canyons and then to the majestic mountains. And then we got to the Rockies. Oh my God, that is all I have to say.

We then took a shortcut through Wyioming that saved us about 70 miles and put us right in the middle of Yellowstone Park. And I really lost it. There are many pictures and videos from our short trip through the park, so Jos did his magic and combined them all together in one single video so that you can see it in sequence. It is unbelievably beautiful and very very humbling.

We saw Elks and Buffalos and forest devastated by wild fire. We went 7,000 feet high and our ears clogged. We saw weird looking bugs that made funny rattling noises, waterfalls and creeks and rivers. We had delicious ice cream and bought souvenirs. We did not want to leave.

The greys had fun with the bugs and left their mark on Yellowstone too, if you know what I mean :-).

Here is Lady, taking a comfy nap

And here is Shooter, as usual, looking around and checking where we are:

But we had to, so we are now in Idaho and we have one more night and two days to go. I am looing forward to getting to my new home and setting roots down. It is fun to travel but it is comforting to go home.

Halfway solitude

Loneliness, solitude, isolation, seclusion, ...

All these words crossed my mind as we were and are in the middle of our long journey today, and far away from home, wherever we call home.
Whether it is West Orange NJ, Napa CA, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Antwerp Belgium, we are very far away from all these places.

When an animal leaves the nest, a certain amount of stress or nervousness settles in, along with awareness of potential dangers and fear of unknowns. As humans, we cannot differentiate ourselves from this, and we also carry some discomfort from leaping into the unknown or from leaving the comfort of the everyday home.

I think another post touched on this subject too. Are we afraid? Or are we confident and secure? From instinct point-of-view, we are certainly afraid. It causes stress and other (normal or) abnormal attitudes.

Anyway, when I overcome my instinct, and rely on logic or on emotion, I conclude that I have many things I love with me.
My wife is with me, and wherever I go, as long as she is with me, I can easily call it my home. I sometimes wish more people I love would be with me to join the trip, and to share this wonderful (but somehow frightening) experience.

The greyhounds seem to think similar, and consider Alexandra and I part of their secure environment. As long as we are near, they seem to feel fine and relaxed, whether it is in the car or in the hotel. But as soon as one of us steps away, they get nervous and stressed. What do they consider their home?????

Wide open space, big endless sky and beautiful land

Today was a day of wide open spaces, huge sky (it looks bigger which is something I always heard people say about this part of the country) and land that is just breathtakingly beautiful. We saw real cowboys on horseback, riding through the fields and we even stopped at a Cowboy Historic Town, which made me think a lot of my dear brother-in-law, Flavio. No pics of the cowboys girls, sorry. (I was driving...)


We drove 350 miles through North Dakota and another hundred and something through Montana. ND is beautiful, the road is wide and you can see miles ahead.


The cargo trains are amazingly long and move very very slowly, I have a video of one of them because it would be impossible to show it through still picture.

There are sunflower fields, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen and it reminded me of a colleague from work back in NJ, who planted sunflowers in her garden with her son.



Here is another funny picture to show how things are from a different dimension here. See our car and trailer compared to our neighbor in the parking lot, hehehe.



We came across Theodore Roosevelt National Park in ND and saw a very beautiful Canyon formation named "Painted Canyon". It was a very nice surprise. We stopped at the Scenic View rest stop and took a few pictures. The Greys enjoyed the break and, as usual, they cause a commotion wherever we stop. :-)



Are we there yet? No, baby, two more nights and three more days.

Road Work Ahead

I am convinced that the United States is just a huge highway that is always under construction. Since we left Nj, and even in NJ, the number of miles of roads under construction is enormous. Today it was in Minesota.
I was sad to leave Wisconsin, it was a very nice state. Nice and wide roads, friendly people and delicious cheese. That is us, leaving the hotel in the weee hours of the morning:

Today we were back to messy roads and crazy drivers, and funny trucks too. Have you ever seen an inclined truck trailer, well here is one:
.
Not much happened today, just a long and boring drive. So I will close with another shot of dear Shooter in his "Are we there yet?" pose:

North Dakota

About a month ago, somebody suggested to someone else the theory that maybe nobody lived in 'North Dakota'. This resulted in the someone else looking for license plates from North Dakota, during my recent drive from NJ to the Niagara Falls. No luck, or theory not proven incorrect: no license plates from North Dakota, despite seeing plates from just about anywhere else.

Finally, a month later, the theory has been proven wrong. ND (North Dakota) does exist, and there are persons living there. The below 6 pictures as proof of cars with ND license plates.

I have to say that it took us a long time before we saw even one. The first one was observed only 75 miles before entering the state. And even after entering the state, the majority of the license plates were still not from ND (most of them from Minnesota).

We will stay the night in Fargo, ND (in honor of the movie). Tomorrow, we will cross the state, and it already feels like we will be crossing the end of the world. If we don't make contact with the world tomorrow, we will have been sucked up by this vast nothingness of ND. I hope we survive, and I hope Montana will bring even more excitement.

The trip so far

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=15+Cleveland+Terrace,+West+Orange,+NJ+07052&daddr=Youngstown,+OH+to:de+forest,+wi+to:fargo,+nd+to:miles+city,+mt&hl=en&geocode=&mra=ls&sll=43.83693,-85.52352&sspn=23.504567,44.296875&ie=UTF8&ll=43.834527,-85.957031&spn=23.504567,44.296875&z=5

This includes tomorrow, already planned because there aren't many options in MT to stay the night with 2 dogs.