United States

The United States on this journal is not a travel destination, exactly, so much as a category for all the weekends we spent putting miles on the same Subaru. The Oregon coast, which we drove end-to-end more times than we can count. The high desert east of Bend. A few long trips further afield: the redwoods, the Tetons, a winter week in Taos that we still talk about.

When the kids were small, the U.S. trips were about sleeping in the same bed every night and driving in daylight. Now they are about pointing the car at a state we have never been to and seeing if the weather cooperates. Sometimes it does.

The whole point of this collection is that it is a family travel journal, not a bucket list. So the trips within our own country end up looking pretty similar to the ones far from it.