Eastward through the Wild West.

Spokane is the first place thus far where we find a host via Couchsurfing — a young married couple that invites us into their home and shares a tasty BBQ dinner with us. We play bocce ball with them and chat over strawberry rhubarb cobbler. It’s interesting to talk to Joe and Sarah about home because the two of them are actually from the same town in Wyoming and have some differing experiences with their hometown and with making Spokane a home, plus they’re about to sell their house and embark on an adventure together teaching English in France for a year. The next day after a delicious breakfast and coffee routine with our wonderful hosts, we each explore Spokane in our own ways and find it to be quite a friendly place.

Next, we head to the Idaho Panhandle, to go see Kelsey’s stepmom’s aunt Donna (whew, what a title!) Donna lives down a rural gravel driveway with one of her daughters, who has her grandchildren, two adorable little girls about 5 and 10 years of age, visiting. By dinnertime, there’s a full house, 9 of us sitting down to eat together. It’s definitely a different lifestyle, but everyone is incredibly kind and hospitable. After dinner, we watch a sheep get sheared and show the girls our van. They speculate on various ways to stowaway and travel with us.

The next day we head to Coeur D’Alene and spend some time sitting in a grassy park, working on a little crafts projects together before visiting a farmers market and getting some tasty snap peas for the road.

It’s getting dark as we cross the Montana border and cruise through more and more rural stretches of highway, glimpsing snatches of water and mountainous shapes in the darkness. The next day is gloomy and rainy. We drive to Whitefish, a cute little town near Glacier National Park. We have a bit of the rainy day blues, so we spend some time sitting in a cute café, sipping mochas and working on plans, before driving to the park.

Due to what we’ll call an “accidental scenic detour,” we arrive at Glacier a bit later than intended, so we get a camping site and spend some time cleaning and organizing the van before having a cozy dinner and conking out. In the morning, the gloom is beginning to burn off a bit, so we take a hike along McDonald Creek, which is awfully big and fast moving for a creek. The scenery is beautiful, the water is this icy blue green, rushing past and dark craggy mountains loom up ahead, shrouded in theatrical mist. We get drizzled on a bit, but don’t mind much in our raincoats. We even come across this gorgeous and nonchalant buck, zigzagging his way lazily across the trail and nibbling at the lush moss. He paws at it with one hoof and looks at us warily for a moment before bending to his knees to resume his vigorous snacking.

After this hike we still feel like we’ve got a little energy left, so we decide to hit one more little mile loop nearby, but after walking a half a mile or so, it begins POURING, and I mean POURING. Our legs are soaked through and we’re worried about the contents of our backpacks, so we decide to turn back and promptly get lost-ish and end up wandering around in the rain for longer than we’d like.

Our next stop is Missoula, a town that’s come highly recommended to us and where Weyaka, a family friend and basically Tressa's fairy Godmother, lives. The weather is still weird and gloomy, so we’re glad to have a cozy place where we feel incredibly at home to hang out and pet three quirky kitties.  In Missoula we visit a farmers market, spend some time shopping with Weyaka, her man, and his daughter at an adorable boutique, do our usual wandering, coffee shop and jogging routine, check out the space where Weyaka is setting up her own fabulous bohemian boutique and chat with her about what’s it’s like to be a Californian creative living in Montana for love. We feel like our batteries have been recharged when we leave Missoula on Monday, headed for Billings.

Billings is the biggest “city” in Montana, but it’s hazy, small and kind of meth-y We see a band called Geographer play at a cool little venue that has some alternative looking people in it and really enjoy the music. It’s fun to go out and try and pretend we’re real youths and not just old ladies in disguise. In the morning, we have breakfast at McCormick’s Café, “where locals eat” and walk around a bit. It’s kind of a weird place, and we wonder if there’s a better part of town we should be in. We make the mistake of trying to get Mexican food in Montana, the first place where someone responds to Tressa's request for a vegetarian burrito by saying, “What?” They concede to give her a burrito with everything but the meat and somehow she ends up eating "an $8 bean and cheese burrito that tastes like bitter, bitter disappointment."

Anyway, instead of heading to North Dakota, we’ve decided to dip down into Wyoming first before heading further East. Wish us luck seeing some dope wildlife.

Tressa & Kelsey

So long, Seattle!

It's hard to convey just how much fun we had in Seattle. We had a lot of fun. In Seattle we were hosted by Kelsey's cousin Kyle, his boyfriend, Ben, and his wonderful apartment mates. Before we even arrived at the apartment, we had a sense that we were going to like Seattle, just walking through Capitol Hill and looking around us at the shops and street art. Although Kyle was working our first evening in town, Ben met up with us and showed us around a bit, split an amazing cupcake with us and took us to gorgeous Gas Works Park where we could see the city skyline as the sun set. This enchanting start to our stay was slightly mitigated by the fact that Seattle also gave us our first parking ticket, and the fact that it took us about two hours to find a place we could actually park without acquiring anymore tickets. Ouch.


Evan drove up to see us from Chico, which put some shed some light on how little distance we've really covered, although we both feel as though we've been living in a van for much longer than we have been. We visited Pike Place Market, which was wonderful and overwhelming, watched fishmongers tossing huge fish at their customers, enjoyed a piroshki, listened to a soulful troupe of singers outside the original Starbucks (which we did not enter - that line was ridonk...), and were vaguely grossed out by the famous gum alley.

One night, Ben took us to visit Kyle at Japonessa, the incredible sushi restaurant where he works, and he sent us a billion tasty things as we sipped on fancy mixed drinks and waited for the rolls we ordered. It was possibly one of the yummiest meals of our lives. We highly recommend the spicy tomato tofu.

On Kyle's night off, we made two big lasagnas for him, Ben, their roommates, Breck and Jay, and their friend Andrew. He mixed us cosmos and we played Cards Against Humanity while we waited for it to bake, and then we downed some beer and some wine, hit the bars and even went to our very first drag show. Those ladies kicked ass, we had so much fun, and everyone else was having so much fun, the energy was contagious. After the show, the stage became a dance floor, flanked by booty shaking cowboys and we got our groove on in a serious way.

Due to the strenuous amounts of fun we had the night before, we missed most of the Fremont Solstice Parade, which apparently features thousands of naked, body painted cyclists, but we bussed into town in time to catch a few naked stragglers and check out the festival, and we made our way to the Fremont bridge to scope out the famous Fremont troll.

On our way out of town, we stopped at Snoqualmie Falls and checked out the Salish Lodge, where a lot of the filming for the hotel in Twin Peaks was filmed. We found it a little strange that there was no mention of the show anywhere, but soon after found Twede's Cafe, "Home of Twin Peaks cherry pie, and a damn fine cup of coffee," and almost lost it. This was us at our most touristy, and we had no choice but to get pie and coffee. It was a pretty strange shift to go from gorgeous, progressive Seattle, to this weird down, where the waitress seemed offended by our presence and didn't mention that there was no such thing as a "small" order of onion rings and instead grumpily brought us a huge, expensive plate of rings that we begrudgingly demolished. There was really no good place to stay in North Bend, so we headed East towards our next destination, Spokane, and crashed in another Walmart lot.

From Portland to Puget Sound

In Portland, we stay with Emily, Derek, and their three kids; this charming, laughing family that surprises us with their goofiness in their adorable house, where we wedge our van so far up the narrow driveway we dread trying to back it out. Portland is drizzly and wet and colorful, we fall in love with the houses, we drink endless coffee, explore Powell's bookstore and snack at the food carts. Our time in Portland, like much of our journey thus far, is meandering and slow. We walk up and down the streets, linger over our coffees and chat with the Clayton family about street art and the ways Portland has changed over the years.


We spend our last night on Alberta Street with a high school friend who takes us to a number of bars, including one filled with cat themed art — the night culminates in a few drunken interviews that we're pretty excited about. All in all, we enjoy Portland, the coffee and the cutesy food trucks and handmade zines, but something about the bustling adorableness is also slightly exhausting, so we're excited to take off for the Olympic National Forest.

The drive to Washington is short and beautiful, lush green hillsides dotted with wildflowers, snowy mountains looming in the distance. We stop in Olympia to get groceries, now that we've picked up our cooler from the REI in Portland, and spend some time organizing the van. Olympia is refreshingly small and drivable, and although we don't see much of it, we get good vibes. We camp out in a Walmart parking lot and visit the farmer's market in the morning to snag some veggies to take camping. The market is bustling with musicians and portraits artists, greens, fruit and honey, homemade soaps and lotions, succulents and knitted goods. We feel at home sniffing at the soaps, sipping coffee, petting a few dogs and finally purchasing some chard and broccoli.

We pass some elk on our way up the peninsula and pull into tiny Forks as the sun is sinking lower in the sky. What we aren't aware of is the fact that the Twilight series is set in Forks, so there is a crazy amount of vampire-fiction related tourist stuff. We spend the night in a rest stop/van pool parking lot and in the morning try and talk to the woman in the visitor center about hot springs but all she wants to talk about is Twilight.

We spend Monday attempting to hike to a viewpoint of Mt. Olympus but underestimate the 6mi uphill hike. We hike for something like three hours, stopping to photograph indignant laser chipmunks, delicate flowers, and waterfalls before stopping for snacks and heading back down to our campsite — the first place we've actually paid to sleep in so far.



The next day we walk to another waterfall on our way out, then take a long winding drive that's not entirely paved to get up to the Hurricane Ridge viewpoint of Mt. Olympus we didn't quite make it to on the previous day. It's a breathtaking panoramic view of snow caps, complete with fluffy munching deer. Afterwards, we drive to Port Angeles and overstay our welcome at an adorable cafe, finally making some progress on planning the next steps of our journey, contacting some folks in East Washington, Idaho, and Montana. We sleep in another Walmart parking lot and in the morning make our way to the Bainbridge Ferry to cross the Puget Sound to Seattle, where we are currently and somewhat belatedly writing this update!