I craved to go beyond the garden gate
follow the road that passed it by
and set out for the unknown.

~Alexandra David-Neel

For a few weeks one summer in college, my best friend and I camped and drove her convertible up from Arizona along the Pacific Coast Highway (HW 1) up to Seattle. It was a pretty trip with few showers and many postcards written with the help of fire and wine! The gate in the above picture was somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's one of my favorite pictures of the trip.

We took a more direct route home (after a detour through McCall, ID). It was twenty-two hours straight of driving. The Killers CD was stuck in the player since Jess was sleeping, and I wasn't about to change it with cliff on one side and canyon on the other in the middle of the night. To this day I have vivid memories of driving through canyonlands in the wee small hours of the morning when I hear Hot Fuss. Ahh college memories...