The dahlia trip was wonderful. The drive up the coast is breath-taking and the weather was perfect. The Mister laughs when I squeak in fear as I negotiate Highway 101. In places it clings to the side of a crumbling cliff twenty stories above the ocean. It's OK that he laughs because I only do it to make him laugh, but all that immense blue space IS scary, and you can tell that the road only exists because some very smart people with a lot of money have taken it as a personal engineering challenge. Our last real kid-free vacation was 12 years ago, and though we lived far away at the time, it just happened to also be a free-wheeling road trip down the same coastline. At the time, we knew that life was going to be changing. We were starting a family. We were also dissatisfied with where we were. We had good jobs, good health, but were greedy enough to want something different. Our 1999 trip was a vacation, a survey of cheap Oregon motels, and a last hurrah, but it was also to scout out towns on the coast for a new start. I started out this trip with nothing more in mind than playing hooky and seeing some beautiful flowers, but once we were on the road it felt like closing a circle of sorts and it was good.
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