Arrived! DC!

We are here! Washington Monument, about 6:45 a.m., taken from across the Potomac.

We made our Fargo stop. What a nice little city. Very vibrant, lots of flowers, murals, great park. Not sure I'd want to live in Fargo, but I would be willing to spend a bit more time there. We ate lunch at Pounds - a very hippie vibe place - so I had to get the "Hippie Bowl" for lunch and I bought a t-shirt. They were very dog-friendly and brought our brown beastie her own doggie snack.

We decided somewhere in Minnesota that we would not dawdle too much along the way. Then, approaching Chicago, we decided that the toll road route looked the best. Big mistake! I think toll roads are a racket. Once you got on them, it is a challenge to change your route and, because it is a pain, you end up getting food and gassing up at the service centers that are on the toll road. It is boring and mindless. We listened to an audiobook, which made it a bit better.

We did get all the way to the way to Cranberry, Pennsylvania. After Cranberry, on the last leg to DC, we took the NO Toll road option and it was much more enjoyable. And we even navigated through Pittsburgh with no major calamities!

Driving (or passengering - which was mostly what I did) for long distances, leaves lots of time to contemplate.

The US has lots of land with few human inhabitants. Our country is varied and beautiful with rugged coasts, sandy beaches, pine forests, deciduous forests, sage brush, deserts, sandstone/limestone, remains of ancient seas carved into bluffs, prairies, farms with red barns, little towns, big cities, sky scrapers. Speeding through on a toll road doesn't allow time to appreciate the landscape or imagine the lives of the people who inhabit the little towns and farms along the way.

Convenience and technology are great in many ways. We are comfortable, there are lots of things we don't have to worry about. We can get more information than we know what to do with and go from place to place with relative speed. And, we miss so much along the way. There is a big downside... we exist in environments built to limit interactions and distractions. We lack connection with reality: temperature changes, sounds, smells, and even time. Our fancy car is a climate controlled bubble providing us with entertainment as it navigates our route. Decision-making was pretty negligible.

Now, however, every day is a decision... because we are unemployed, we have no outside-dictated routine except for the dog's insistence on morning walks. We are starting our list of "must do" things while we are here and also thinking about the next stint. We watched "House Hunters International" last night, we are thinking our next 2-months-at-a-time plan maybe in another country. The brown trekking dog goes to the vet in mid September to get all her paperwork in order so she can be a world traveler.