Hello everyone. This is the first official post, but let’s not worry about formalities. Let’s jump right in!

We’ve been talking about this blog for a long time, foolishly raising expectations, and I know some of you are wondering whether we will live up to them. Well, the answer is no. Let’s get that out of the way right now. It will be enough for us that this blog act as a repository of our frustrations, with the odd joke thrown in. And by odd I mean strange, and not very funny. Please lower your expectations accordingly.

Now on to the narrative:

We left our jobs and former home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. at the end of July and drove, with our two pets, to Michigan. I don’t have much to say about this part of the trip, except: Thank God — and Lynn Animal Hospital in Riverdale — for cat sedatives. They turned a potentially intolerable situation into one that was merely uneventful.

After The Fattening — in Michigan just about everywhere you go it’s $3.99 for a big bucket of meat and eggs — we took our time coming out West, partly because the cat sedatives seemed not to work as well (Ivan apparently developed an immunity), and partly because after the ordeal of selling the house, packing, quitting our jobs, doing work gratis for our former employers, falling into the Potomac twice on our farewell canoe trip, and spending a week driving all over southeast Michigan, despite serious bloat, to visit my friends and relatives — well, we were pretty beat. And really, Iowa isn’t all that bad.

Once in Wyoming, we immediately forgot the dangers of high altitude (Laramie is at 7,220 feet) and drinking on an empty stomach, which put us out of commission for a few days.

But now we’re back, wrapping up the final details (never believe real estate agents when they tell you not to worry about discontinuing utility service) and preparing to fly out of Denver on Aug. 28. Before that, we’ll be doing a little camping around Wyoming and posting some pictures — especially from our planned Aug. 25 Farewell Party in the Spruce Mountain Fire Tower, (available for only $49 a night!), which looms 100 feet over the beautiful Medicine Bow National Forest. You haven’t seen dawn until you’ve seen it at 5:30 a.m. from such a lofty, isolated perch.

Before that (and soon, I hope) we’ll have a brief account of tubing down the North Platte in Casper, wherein my inner tube, despite being industrial strength, exploded after an encounter with a sharp stick on the riverbank. Or gave up after two hours straining under the weight of my rear end, hard to tell which. Seventeen dollars down the tube, so to speak. That night we camped on Casper Mountain, a day before the whole thing went up in flame. We’ll bring you the sordid tale in its entirety soon.

I hope the suspense is enough to bring you all back for more. 😉

–Marc