Day 1, Saturday, July 26, 2008:
Washington, DC to Ann Arbor, Michigan (via Pittsburgh and Cleveland)

Passengers: 2
Bags of chocolate: 3
Number of stops because Sarah had to go to the bathroom at an undesignated time: countless…

Today, we left DC after more than three years for me and almost two years for Mike and began our journey to the West Coast. I am new to the personal blog-o-sphere so I am not sure how much background information is appropriate, but we are heading across America (yay America!) en route to Berkeley, California so that I can begin graduate school and Mike can…hopefully be employed soon and support my lavish student lifestyle. I am no Perez Hilton (and I promise we won’t be seeing any celebrities en route), but hopefully this will be interesting and informative and allow me to avoid sending mass e-mails, which I always BCC to people so I can pretend that I am sending everyone a personalized e-mail.

Mike has been hoping that “something cool will happen so we can write about it in our blog,” but unfortunately, rural Pennsylvania and Ohio aren’t that interesting… which is probably why we have an entire CD full of songs about California but none bout this area of the country. I suppose every coastal elitist should make this pilgrimage at least once. And what better way for us to begin our all-American trip than in a blue station wagon with Daniel, my little brother, who we will pick up in Chicago.

I suppose that this is an appropriate beginning to our trip because this is the land of (some of) my ancestors and one should really know where one is coming from before traveling far from home. However, Mike did point out as we reached the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio that “we seem to be entering an area where people grow stuff.” True. And I kind of have a weird obsession with silos, which abound along our route along with fields of (probably) corn.

Tonight we will be camping just outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan and doing a test run of our tent, which will be our home for our time in Yellowstone. Read: after 8 hours in the car Mike and I will inevitably not be able to set up our tent, whose directions are probably translated into English from Chinese (where is Clare Sierawski when you need her?!?) and it will probably be raining. But nevertheless, I am excited to be on the road and to have all of our stuff packed and shipped. And Mike is excited to show me where he went to graduate school and take me to Zingerman’s Deli, a restaurant which he promises has “a lot of fancy cheeses like you like to eat.”

Picture 1: Subie Sue packed and on the road.
Picture 2: Yay, we set up our tent (and it was still light outside!)
Picture 3: Our neighbor was living in an RV at the campground with a swimming pool full of ducks. Not Kidding. (Our other neighbors were 30-somethings who got ridiculously drunk and woke up in the middle of the night and puked all over their tent and then proceeded to scream at each other about whether puke would come out of a tent...LOVE it.)