“Bring music or podcasts or something outside Foranger. It’s so flat. You can see for miles and miles. […]

Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people’s blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.”
-Mary Karr

I’ve never been labeled rich before, unless we’re referring to life experience. I have, however, been called crunchy.

Now that I am officially not guiding anymore, and my bike trip is over, and I’m back in the gentle rains of Washington, I find myself thinking hard about where I’m going to call home. Home has been just about anywhere the last six years. I’d stumble over my words when asked where home is for me on my bike ride. Saying Washington only used to be true, and saying Wyoming felt off too, if only because I was so in between at the time.

Despite my bravado in biking solo on the other side of the world and the perception you may have on what kind of girl does that, I had no idea what I was doing. Before I booked my ticket to the antipodes and set out to cycle around Tasmania and the length of New Zealand, I did not speak bike.

The height of summer can be so blissful, carefree, and unhurried. But here in Teton County, it is full-blown tourist-crazed, crowded, uncomfortably hot and the wildlife is hiding. I always seem to forget about Angry August until it arrives. It’s time like these that my mind remembers the sweeter, calmer places I’ve spent summers in. It makes me think of other places I’d rather be in.

Like Alaska. I wrote my old boss and dear friend a “letter of recommendation” for Alaska for the girl he really wanted to move there. I think she was a little put-off and confused by my letter, more specifically, why I wrote it. But she did move there. This letter is part memory-keeper, part inspiration for you to high-tail in up to Alaska in the middle of summer one year. It’s absolutely blissful, carefree and unhurried.