Seattle (originally posted 5/25/08)

... is where I am now. I spend a good deal of time thinking on things while I'm driving, making observations and such, so I figured I would share a few of the less embarrassing or private ones. I woke up this morning in a little town in Montana name of Dillon (yes, there is also a Dillon, CO, but the similarities end there). I then drove to Butte, which is a strange, unassuming, almost naive (from what I could tell driving around, I never actually got out of my car there) city. It's overlooked by beautiful, but I couldn't tell how beautiful because they were capped by low-ceilinged clouds, mountains, and I think it might be called Butte because of the orange-colored rock-quarry looking thing that guards the city from the west. Butte is all casinos and churches. Downtown (they call it "Uptown") Butte had about 10 historic brick buildings, of which nine were churches and one was a saloon. I spent most of my 30 minute-visit to Butte driving around calling "coffee," which is how I look for things. I think it's probably a good thing I never found a traveling companion since some of my habits, not the least my habit of looking for things by calling their name (it works more often than you'd think, though it did not work for my passport... yet), could be construed as annoying or maybe even abrasive. I finally found some coffee at "Hot Shots" drive-through espresso. Not delicious, but coffee nonetheless.

So that's Butte, MT. I drove through about 10 other medium sized and about 50 small-sized cities today but I'm tired and so that's all you get to hear about. Anyway, Butte was where I spent the most time and made the most observations. My mind is far more keen and alert at 9:30 a.m. than it is at, say, 6:30 p.m., at which time I was in George, WA, at the Gorge Amphitheater hoping to run into Nick. I didn't actually expect to find him among the thousands of people there, but needed a break so I went and hung out outside the entrance to the music festival and watched the hippies and goths and emos stream in to see Death Cab for Cutie anyway. The Gorge is a pretty cool venue, sitting right on the top of this huge, well, gorge, which the Columbia River flows through.