Today is my mom's birthday and she's with us in Brooklyn for a week. Last year at this time she and I were driving across the country, celebrating her 60th. She was going to go alone but since I am pretty much able to work from anywhere, I flew out to Seattle with my laptop and we hit the road. Here are some of the photos (you can see the rest in sequence on my Flickr page).We figured we should start at the Pacific, so we drove to Cape Disappointment.We spent her birthday in Missoula, MT, at the Missoula Club and the Oxford, which has an impressive display of firearms above the bar, and the sweetest bartender and kitchen staff on the planet.We did a little camping along the way. At Yellowstone it was sunny during the day but got down to the teens at night. One morning we woke up with a quarter-inch of ice coating the tent.The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota was one of the highlights of the trip. This looked like a major road on the map but turned out to be 40+ miles of dirt, and a great way to see some parts of the res that we would normally have missed. Having read so much about Pine Ridge I was happy to be there and see it first-hand.I'm leaving a lot out here, you should really check out the whole thing on Flickr if you care one little bit about me. This is in the Ozark National Riverways, in Missouri.Emily met us in Pittsburgh and we hit up a bunch of thrift and record stores—and of course we couldn't miss Primanti Bros., home of the sandwich with fries inside. Emily and I loved Pittsburgh and thought we could happily live there. The thing is, you can't just move around all the time—there's a hundred cities I would like to live in for awhile but it's just not realistic. I feel lucky to have been able to try out both coasts.The next day we went down to Fallingwater, and then on to Gettysburg, and back to Brooklyn the following day.We ended the trip at the Atlantic (well, sort of: New York Harbor) on the dock at Red Hook.

I have been to Europe a few times, and it's great—I've had a lot of fun over there. But there is nothing better than a roadtrip through the United States. I don't mean there's not a better vacation—I mean that I don't know of an activity of any kind that is more fun than a roadtrip. That's especially true when you go coast to coast. You feel like you're in the middle of American history—you feel like what you're doing is epic, even though the minute-by-minute action of it is not always riveting. That's how life is anyway—all the little moments add up to something pretty fucking epic.

Junior Mama Used to Say MP3