Our lease for our apartment in NC ended 3 days after the wedding. I had envisioned us completely packing up the house before the wedding and being ready to set off on a romantic honeymoon right after leaving the goat farm. This did not happen. We did not hardly begin to pack up until Monday and had to be out on Wednesday. Fortunately we had lots of help from Eli’s parents and sister. We also had the entertainment of a left over and still partly full canister of helium.
We finally drove off on Wednesday afternoon after I said an almost tearful goodbye to the couch that we first kissed on (I actually told the woman who picked it up our story and made her take a photo of the two of us kissing for the last time on this couch… Eli was not happy about this.) The Uhaul was heavy and my car sagged a bit with the load. Our gas mileage quickly fell to about 16 mpg and Eli started getting stressed out about whether we were going to make it over the Rockies (we did). It wasn’t the easy post-wedding get-away that I had hoped for.
About halfway through the trip we decided that this was only the first honeymoon… there will be another that doesn’t require camping or hauling everything we own along with us. We ended up getting to a Salt Lake City campground at 9:55, 5 minutes before it was supposed to close. Apparently they closed the camp for the weekend. Then we went to an RV campground, but they weren’t open. Then we gave up and went to Walmart. The first Walmart was under construction and too creepy, so we went to another and joined a small group of car and RV campers. After spending the night sleeping upright in a Walmart parking, we decided that there will certainly be another honeymoon.
But other near catastrophes aside, it was lovely. The United States is beautiful. There was Appalachia, and the Great Plains, and then the Rockies, and the Great Salt Lake, and then suddenly Oregon, which is just about as beautiful as anywhere, really. It’s beautiful like Scotland was beautiful. The landscape feels tragic and then suddenly hopeful. The forests are green and wet with black soil and mossy goop sticking to anything that’s alive. It’s rainy most of the time, but when it’s not, the light is peach and lights up everything, if only for an instant.
Here are a few photos that I like of Eli during the first and expectantly less romantic honeymoon.
Eli inspecting the trailer in Appalachia
Eli and a mushroom in the woods
We camped by this lake somewhere in Missouri
Great Salt Lake and Eli
Eli and the super 8
Walking towards the lake and avoiding buffalo
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