Marcel's Blog

Hey everyone! It was great visiting in Denver last week. Although I was only there for a day and a half I was able to see a lot of people. I really enjoyed catching up with some old friends and seeing all the familiar faces. Too bad I couldn't see everyone but there is only so much you can do in that short amount of time. I'm sure I'll be back in the future to do some more hiking and visiting. And of course anyone that comes out this way should definitely give me a holler so we can get together for some drinks etc.

I guess it's obvious since I'm writing this that I made it back safe and sound. The drive with that ridiculously large 24' Budget truck was quite an adventure. Fortunately I didn't hit any bad weather except a few thunderstorms up in eastern Montana. I took I-25 up north to Billings, then I-90 west the rest of the way to Seattle. It was a total of 1420 miles in all, and took me 29 hours of driving including a few stops here and there but excluding the hotel time in Billings. All in all including the hotel time the drive only took about 41 hours. I drove 12 hours to Billings and then 17 hours the next day to make it to Seattle by 2am. It was much faster than I had planned given that I was driving a big diesel truck that would only go up to 70mph and less on an incline. It was a very scenic drive all the way. I have never driven through Montana before, and as I suspected it was awesome. There were mountains to the west all the way up to Billings. West of there I was surrounded by mountains pretty much the rest of the way. I'm glad the highway went through the valleys for most of the drive so there was only a couple mountain passes to go over. The only passes that were significant were just before Butte MT at the Continental divide, going into Idaho, and Snoqualmie pass just west of Seattle. The divide was only about 6300 feet at that point which is about the same elevation as Colorado Springs, and the other two were even lower so the entire route was really easy compared to going west I70 from Denver.

Now that I'm unloading all our stuff out of this truck (which was only half full) I'm wondering what do we need all this stuff for? Sure there are lots of things we needed like a real bed, clothes, ironing board, broom, dishes, snowboards and our mountain bikes; but a lot of it is just junk. We will for sure be simplifying our lives by making many more trips to the Salvation Army donation center like we did before we moved. Funny how living out of a backpack for 4 months can change your perpective on life. All that time I though man if I just had another backpack this size I'd have everything I could possibly need. Now I just want to get rid of half the junk in our apartment so we can live clutter free. Just one of many life lessons learned for traveling. We hope to learn many more in our future travels.

It's been nagging at me for a while now but finally our move is completed with this last big task of getting or stuff from storage done. We feel like we actually live here now, not like we are just drifters passing through. As true WA residents we are looking forward to getting settled into our new lives here and continuing the cosmicadventures.
Cheers!