The Travels of Nolan & Laura

As I mentioned yesterday, the atlas is one of my best friends. Any time I am hitting the road, I dig the atlas out (usually not very deep) and away we go! One of my favorite things to do is highlight the roads we have traveled on so we can see the many places we have gone. Laura and I were travleing together long before we started dating. We were both on the track and cross country teams in college, so we literally logged thousands of miles before we started dating and keeping track of our travels. Any of our travels before we started dating don't count.

Here are some pictures of the atlas as of today - you can see Nebraska, Wyoming and around Missoula. You can see from the picture of Nebraska that we have covered many of the routes around the state. Keep in mind, this basically was within one year because we on traveled on 20 miles of new roads in Nebraska during our Christmas break.

Here is Wyoming. We have traveled on almost every road that crosses the state. We have a few more to travel down, but very few. One of the great things about being here in Montana is traveling back to Wyoming or Nebraska - we can usually find a new road to travel down and see some new countryside.

Here's the Missoula area - as you can see we don't get out of town much. The one thing about living in the mountains is you are really limited to 'escape' routes out of town. You can only to South on the major road, or hit the Interstate and head East or West.. You can go North if you go West for a few miles - that's how you get to Glacier National Park. The big difference is the back roads - there arn't many back roads here - atleast compared to Nebraska. That is perhaps one of the biggest changes and problems for us here - we have to travel down major roads to get anywhere. So as you can see, we have gone South a little, and to Idaho via the Lolo Pass - where Lewis and Clark went 200 years ago.

In the past few years, I have really become a highway traveler. I like the slow pace and easy going feeling you get. The Interstate tends to be a fast paced, unhappy, mass of drivers that just want to get there, and don't want to see anything along the way. When we moved we took Highway 30 from Kearney to Cheyenne - I had never been down the highway the entire way to Cheyenne and I really liked the drive. Even though it took a lot longer than buzzing down the interstate, it was a lot more fun to see small towns and the scenery along the way. Sometimes you just have to slow down and see what you have been missing to really understand where you have been. Until again

-=Nolan=-