From Michigan to Mile High

Hello everyone - this is Dan, coming to your screen from Denver!

We spent most of July back in Michigan. It was extremely fulfilling for us to visit with so many family members and friends (although definitely also exhausting for us introverts!). We spent the first week with Corinne's parents, and helped host their annual 4th of July party on the lake with some of her extended family and family friends. During the week, we drove into Grand Rapids each night (about 45 minutes each direction) in order to meet up with different friends.

The second week, we traveled "up north" for a camping weekend with Dan's extended family and then we were able to relax a little bit at the extended family cottage - both on Lake Michigan near Manistee. We checked out Lake Bluff Farms, which we had driven by many times on the way to the cottage but never stopped at. This is a small arboretum that is home to the largest sequoia east of the Rocky Mountains!

The third week was spent in Traverse City with my parents. We helped them celebrate their wedding anniversary and explored areas near my hometown that I had not been to in a long time - including the Old Mission peninsula and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Corinne explored the coffee shop and book store scene downtown, and I did a sunset hike on the Empire Bluff Trail and enjoyed the views. It was a good reminder of how much beauty Michigan has to offer - even in the lower peninsula. We're leaving for now, but I really do think that Michigan is a beautiful and underrated place. If you are one of our readers who is not from there, I encourage you to check it out.

For the final week we were back with Corinne's parents, spending more quality time on the lake and squeezing in a few more visits with friends. Thank you so much to all of our family and friends who were able to make time to see us last month - and if we didn't manage to meet up, we'll catch you next time we're back!

Then it was July 31 and time to leave for Denver. It was an amazing experience driving out here. The total trip is about 18 hours, but we split it up into four days so that each day was only 4-6 hours of driving (we're still working on that post about traveling in an EV that is weighed down by all of our gear!). The kitties quickly got used to the car again.

We spent the first night in Springfield, Illinois before reaching Kansas City on the second night. Kansas City was a new experience for me, but Corinne had visited several times before for work. We had some excellent BBQ at Hawg Jaw Que and Brew, which she used to frequent on those work trips. Also on the way out, we stopped in Missouri where I played my 350th disc golf course.

The third day was when the terrain really started to deviate from the Midwestern scenery that we grew up with. The Great Plains are just so...open! We had seen the pictures and movies and stories, but it was still something else entirely to be there. Our visibility was limited more by the wildfire haze than it was by the terrain in many areas. I am sure that if we were to drive through often, the plains would get boring - but I will cherish this memory of driving through them for the first time. We also enjoyed our third night in Hays, Kansas - the largest city for a long, long way in any direction (I played a surprisingly solid disc golf course there too - it apparently dates all the way back to 1983).

The five hours of driving on the final day were somehow even more desolate. We guessed what we were in for when the road signs near Hays were already advertising Denver as the next significant westbound destination - well over 300 miles away at that point. But the amount of expanse in this section of far western Kansas and eastern Colorado is hard to overstate. We could tell that we were going uphill slightly more than downhill as we drove west, but the wildfire haze had moved off and we could see miles and miles in any direction. We stopped in the small town of Goodland, Kansas which is home to the "World's Largest Easel!"

Then - around the town of Byers Colorado, the mountains came over the horizon - and soon after that the Denver skyline. If you have never seen Denver sitting in front of the mountains before, look it up. I had experienced part of this in 2023 when I flew into Denver for a long weekend (Denver's airport is on the far eastern side of the city, and our plane's west-facing approach was over the flat, desolate fields. I still remember looking out the window to see only that and thinking "is this really Denver?" Then we landed and taxied towards the gate and the plane turned 90 degrees, and there it was - the big city, and the even bigger mountains behind it). Driving into Denver from the east was like that, only with the added anticipation and impact of having spent the past two days driving hundreds of miles over the plains. It sounds weird, but even that alone made Denver worth the trip.

We are settling in here in Denver and will be here for almost seven weeks! Our specific plans here are still being worked out - but besides connecting with a couple of friends out here, we know we'll be exploring the city, seeing two concerts at the famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and taking short day/1-night trips into the mountains to see Rocky Mountain National Park, Maroon Bells, and more.

I'll close with an announcement. This traveling thing is going so well that we decided we're going to keep doing it for a while! The plan is still for us to end in Seattle, but the original 4-6 month timeframe has now been scrapped. Instead, we'll continue traveling around until we feel like stopping - maybe in the winter or spring of 2026. After Denver we'll be headed down to Albuquerque, New Mexico for another seven weeks. After that? We'll figure that out as we go. :)

- Dan