The roadtrip is almost upon us. Tomorrow, there will be only one more week left till it's time to load up the Echo and hit the road! After a year or more of planning, it's almost hard to believe. Some things were bought well in advance. Cirque du Soleil's KA in Las Vegas requires you to get tickets months out if you want to have a good seat. A helicopter trip over the Grand Canyon, Blue Man Group in Vegas; we have some big ticket items on our trip. But if you're going to go on a roadtrip of this size, you might as well make it worthwhile. It's crunch time for me with this website: anything I want to be on here better be finished soon! I still need to get a decent webcam for the time lapse videos, I've got my fingers crossed for pulling off that portion of the project. Everything else should go pretty smoothly, depending on how many hotels along the way have internet access. Not all of them will, but if we have to update every few days instead of every night, that's not the end of the world.

When you're traveling as many miles as we will be, you reach a point where you just can't see everything you want to. I'd love to see Yosemite park, devote more time to Yellowstone park, see more of the landscape north of the Grand Canyon. It's just impossible to fit everything in. Plus, even if we wanted to fit everything, weather becomes an issue. Since we're going in April, some places will still be under snow. The north rim of the Grand Canyon will still be closed, Crater Lake advises skis or snowshoes, and Glacier national park has (surprise) glaciers. As it is, I obviously have my fingers crossed that 2007 isn't the year that Washington state is blanketed in a late April blizzard that amazes meteorologists the world round. I can plan and schedule the trip all I want; but once we leave, some stuff is out of my hands.

But I don't dwell on what I won't get to see or the things that could go wrong. This trip is about getting away from it all. After my deployment, the number one thing on my mind was to get to do a trip on my own terms, and to do it with my best friend in the world. Some people were confused as to why, after being away for so long, I would want to leave again so soon. It's simple really. There's a huge difference from going away and getting away. Thanks to the Army, I had to go away for a long time. Now that I'm back though, I get the chance to get away. Sure, I could pick something easier, like a trip to the beach, or even a flight out to any of the locations on the roadtrip. But I want the adventure that comes with the travel. Airports and flights aren't adventures. They're headaches! Getting on the open road with your friend; that's the adventure. First of many we will have.

We'll try our best to keep the website current as we go, with journals (either voice or text), time lapse videos, pictures, and videos of our insanity. Dena and I make a pretty crazy team, or so we think. It's time we took this show on the road!