As if the amazing weekend with Dave weren’t enough, we were doubly glad we decided to reroute to Bozeman instead of Missoula as we came around the bend on I-90 and saw huge funnels of smoke in front of us. Missoula was on fire. As was much of that part of Montana, Washington, Oregon and California. At the same time the Gulf Coast was getting pounded by hurricanes. But there’s no global warming, right? It’s probably nuttin’. Those aren’t clouds below, that’s a funnel of smoke. It was so thick during that stretch of the drive, it was hard to breath inside the car even with the windows up. There were parts of the drive where you had to put your hazards on to see the other cars. The pets were wheezing. Pretty wild to think about.

We crossed the Western Continental Divide. We’ll be flowing toward the Pacific from now on.

Fair warning. We did not do Spokane justice. As in, we did not see Spokane. Literally, did not enter the town itself. We did, on the other hand, see a very beautiful home, very beautiful scenery, and meet two very beautiful people, our fine hosts, John and Marlee.

By this point, we’d started to do the math on the miles left and realized we needed to pick up the pace a good bit to get to California on time, so we had to start to do a lot of one night stopovers from here. We had every intention of going out to poke around Spokane, but after arriving at the before-mentioned crazy beautiful home and meeting our charming hosts, we decided to (quite literally) kick our feet up and just enjoy our luscious surroundings.

Words can’t express how cool these people are. We all fell in love after only spending a few hours together. Could have talked to them forever. For real. We both texted a bit into the drive “Is it weird to miss y’all after only spending one evening/morning together?” I think not. They even snap this selfie of them in their PJs early the morning we had to head out. Were sad we couldn’t linger.

Thank you, John and Marlee, for taking a leap of faith on us crazy kids. See you in Sayulita soon. And thanks for great tip about the route to take to Oregon through the Hood River Valley. Might have been the most beautiful drive of our trip and that’s really saying a lot at this point.