It’s Thursday morning. Adrian and I have been on the road since Saturday. We’re at the halfway point of our trip, 5 days down and 5 to go. At this very moment, we’re driving on HWY 93 in Montana. To be more specific, Adrian is driving; I’m riding in the passenger seat (I’m not that good at multi-tasking). Apparently, we’ve seen a lot in the past few days. We’ve taken over 600 pictures, though thankfully Adrian spent two hours sorting through them and narrowed it down to 271. We’ll see how many details I can actually remember.
The Wedding
We left my place at 10 am Saturday morning, headed down to the Columbia River Gorge for a wedding. We met up with Adrian’s friends Royce and Stephanie to caravan down there. Royce had this plan for us to stop at Olympia (Washington’s capitol, for you out-of-staters) to get pizza. Seems a bit random, but it was on the way and it was excellent pizza. While we waited for the pizza to be cooked, we walked around downtown Olympia. We found the artesian well in the middle of a parking lot (just as random as it sounds). We stopped at a sporting goods store and I bought a fleece, which has come in handy because it has been freezing. So, we got the pizza and ate it on the campus of the Capitol. Then it was back on the road to the wedding.
The wedding was an outdoor wedding at Caroline’s house (the bride). The setting was beautiful; her backyard overlooks mountains. Behind the bride and groom was the garden, with plenty of sunflowers blooming. The groom, Kane, is one of Adrian’s architecture friends, so there we knew a lot of the people there. I’ve never been at a wedding where the bride and groom looked so happy to be there. After the ceremony, there was plenty food and beer, and thus, lots of eating and drinking.
Later in the evening, we headed to some sort of “Hoptoberfest” in town. With all those locals drinking beer in a tent, it felt very small town and comfortable to me. Adrian had a good time dancing. Unlike me, he drank enough to enjoy dancing. It was pretty entertaining (and by that I mean embarrassing). I spent most my time out of sight of the dance floor. When they stopped selling beer, it was back to Caroline’s for a little more celebrating. Caroline’s family let the guests camp in their field, so we spent the first of 7 nights on the new air-mattress. It was wicked windy, enough that the tent would blow in far enough to touch my shoulder as I tried to sleep. Continuing their hospitality, Caroline’s family provided the whole group breakfast in the morning, so we filled up before hitting the road.
Missoula Here We Come
Sunday was uneventful, we had to drive like 8.5 hours from Kane & Caroline’s to Missoula, Montana where we were crashing with Adrian’s friend Jamie. The drive was pretty insignificant, driving through south-eastern Washington was excruciatingly boring. We did make a few stops to entertain ourselves, one of them being at a Super-Walmart and the other being almost as good (but it’s pretty hard to beat Super-Walmart… they don’t have those in Seattle). We listened to the Seahawks game on the radio. They lost in the most pathetic of ways. It made Adrian a bit cranky. We made it to Montana, where I swear the sky is bigger. Adrian thinks I’m crazy, but I’m pretty sure it is. We finally rolled into Missoula and found Jamie’s apartment. We cleared a spot for the air-mattress (night 2 of 7) and went to a sports bar so we could converse AND watch football (woo hoo, football). Jamie was a lot of fun, seems like exactly the kind of person I’d make friends with.
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