It’s time for the 2024 Summer Road Trip: Charlie Goes to the Pacific Northwest! These trips have been wonderful, and I’m very excited for this year’s edition. To recap past trips:
- A three-week solo trip in 2017 which took me to Canada’s Prairie Provinces, and California. (the red-orange line on the map above)
- A three-week trip to Nova Scotia in 2022 with Charlie, with stops in Ontario, Quebec, and Boston (the green line)
- A four-week trip to the American Southwest in 2023 with Charlie, with stops in the High Plains, California, Arizona, and New Mexico 9 (the yellow line), which gave me the wonderful photo collages below
This year, shown in the blue line on the map, Charlie and I will be on the road for four weeks to the Pacific Northwest and to Denver! I had so much fun last year, and traveling with Charlie is always very enjoyable. Solo road trips can be an incredibly isolating experience, and I find having a cute and friendly dog along helps to break the ice. I’ve gotten into so many great random conversations with people that were started from people wanting to say hello to Charlie.
As I was planning this year’s route, I thought about where I’ve been, and where I want to return to. I grew up in the American Southeast, spending the first 30 years of my life in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. I’ve had quite enough of those and am looking forward to seeing new places! And while I have friends there and know many wonderful people live there, I have zero desire to visit Texas or Florida in the current political climate. This extends to much of the Southwest, to be honest.
I haven’t been in the Pacific Northwest since 2020, when I spent Christmas there in a lovely AirBnB in Capital Hill, so Seattle seems like a great destination. I haven’t been to Portland since 2017, so an extended stop there would be nice. And I always want to visit Denver – I love the heck out of that city. So with my anchor points set, it was time to lay out my itinerary.
I don’t want to dawdle along the way between Chicago and Seattle, so I’ll be driving like hell across North Dakota, Montana, and Washington to get there as quickly as possible. At the same time, I try to keep each day’s driving to around six hours to leave time to relax and maybe explore our stop for the night a bit. Likewise the sprint between Portland and Denver will be as short as possible, but hopefully I’ll get to see some nice things along the way.
As always, I will be posting near-daily updates here on my blog, as well as lots of posts to social media (Mastodon and BlueSky). As with last year, if you want easy notifications of blog entries, you can either subscribe to my Telegram channel (now with a feedback chat!) or RSS.
I hit the road on Saturday, and I just can’t wait!