Arrive Saturday, August 16
90 Miles | 2 Hours
We finally arrive home at around 8pm and check out how the place looks after being left behind and rented out for the past couple of months— pretty barren, but familiar all the same.
We fall asleep on a humid evening, before getting fully unpacked— to the distant sound of thunder and the flash of dry lightning, it's surreal to see it outside our window, and it will lead to the largest and most destructive fire ever in Santa Cruz Country.
For the next couple of mornings, we wake up disoriented, thinking we are still on the road, and with our full workloads and school now underway, we are slow to fully unpack over the next few days, amidst news that many of our friends and clients have been displaced by fires that commenced on the night of our return. We get busy providing housing for friends and first responders and help with donations as best we can, happy to be able to be home and to be able to make a difference first hand.
By the end of our first week back it’s almost like we never left, except that we now have a thousand new memories, deeper perspective on human nature of our fellow U.S. citizens, and amazing stories to share. It’s been a road trip for the ages, but we are also glad we can be with our community in this time of need.
Looking back on the experience, when asked it’s hard to pick any single destination on our journey as the highlight of the trip, when virtually every major stopover we made was a magic memory filled with adventure--from the roaring of a thousand grasshoppers underfoot when we unexpectedly pulled off the highway for a moment to a million gallons of scalding hot water in Yellowstone when we pulled our minds off the heaviness of our country's condition.
In the end, it’s the sheer variety of places we were able to visit that has made this cumulatively the best way we could have ever imagined how our summer would play out in the midst of a paralyzing pandemic.
The opportunity to spend such an experience together as a family is something we can always be grateful for, and we feel additionally fortunate for the many special connections we were able to share along the way with family and friends, both new and old, all across this great land.
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