our midwest love

we love the midwest so much, and we want you all to love the midwest too.

minneapolis

the mississippi







my auntie's house in wisconsin
auntie!

young hearts be free tonight

we have been on the road for 1 1/2 months! and guess what happened yesterday? we made it to the east coast!!!!

I had nothing to do on this hot afternoon but settle down and write you a line

grand forks north dakota is on the border of minnesota. in fact, the grand forks river splits the city into two- grand forks north dakota and grand forks minnesota. the north dakota side is home to the busiest intersection in north dakota and our dear dear friend leah.

the best part about taking 3 months to drive all over the us? visiting far flung friends, spending real time with them, in their hometowns or newly adopted ones. leah is a born and raised grand forks north dakotan; todd met her in santa cruz when he was 18.
spending a few days in grand forks and discovering how much we loved it, i wonder how many other awesome little cities and towns we just drive by, on our way to the chicagos and minneapolises.
leah is an amazing hostess- we rode bikes. . .
ate the north dakota specialty taco in a bag,
went to the speedway and watched the races,
light off fireworks, ate dill pickle chips, went to the lake, loved grand forks.
there are times in our lives where everything is perfect, and we usually don't realize it until it is over. when all your best friends live in the same town, and the weather is just right, and the fun seems to happen without planning it. santa cruz summer days, working with your buddies. . .
things change, people move away, get new jobs, have kids, drift apart. such is life. you have to re-negotiate your friendships from afar, email, text messages, phone calls. this is part of getting older i am realizing.
we said goodbye to leah, knowing full well that we will never live in the same city as each other again. it is bittersweet and it is life.
and knowing what it looks like to be leah in the summertime in grand forks is sweet.

under god, the people rule

south dakota, great faces, great places.
we camped in the black hills, one of the most sacred places for the lakota sioux. we woke up at 4 am to earth shaking thunder and lightning and pouring rain. would we float away, in our tent?
the history is palpable in these black hills. we stood still and listened to the wind in the trees, who else over the years had stood here, listening?
probably some gold prospectors, like these two! deadwood.
south dakota is a place you should all see. packed here in the middle of the usa, it is full of monuments, weird roadside attractions, truly mind blowing prairie land, the black hills, the badlands.




the badlands.

O Canada! Where pines and maples grow

Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow,
How dear to us thy broad domain,
From East to Western sea!
in banff , we hiked out onto the columbia ice field, which is a giant monster of a glacier , and is over 10,000 years old.there are signs every 200 yards or so marking how big the glacier used to be, in 1977, in 1997. in the past ten years more than half of the glacier has melted away.
they expect that all the land glaciers will be gone by 2030.
this change isn't just some ice melting away. as we learned on fliers posted everywhere, the slow melt off of the glaciers feed almost every river on the continent. from the columbia icefield, the melt off goes to both the pacific and the atlantic via multiple rivers and lakes.
and suddenly they will be gone! and what will we do then? it is a crazy shift to try and understand.
the lakes in banff get this spectacular color from minerals in the glacier runoff.



banff on canada day. oh canada!

montana is the home of glacier park, the usa's (and canada's) worst and meanest mosquitos, and some epic prairie land.
a moose!


the weeping wall.



our home on the range.

it took us about 10 hours to cross montana.