Road Trip Day 2: Fellow Washingtonians

I-90. Love it or leave it.

In Wyoming, we pulled off the freeway to gas up and drove past a couple of hippies, a man and a woman, walking into town. He wore long hair and a guitar thrown over his back, she was in a skirt, dreads, and a Grateful Dead tee shirt. When we saw their nalgenes, we knew they were from Washington.

Nobody carries nalgenes around outside of Western Washington (and maybe parts of California). As we proceeded further and further west, we got weirder and weirder looks for filling our water bottles at soda dispensers and water fountains. In the New Hampshire welcome center, a man actually stared at me as I filled my nalgene from the tap. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The woman smiled at me as she filled her nalgene at the soda fountain in the gas station convenience store, and I didn't see them again until Ashley and I were ready to pull out. Then the woman, sitting in the shade of the convenience store's awning, called out, “Hey, which way are you guys going? West?”

“No, sorry, we're going east.”

“Oh, I saw the Washington plates and thought you were going home.”

“Sorry, we're headed for New Hampshire.”

We said goodbye and got on the road. “I wish we could just turn around and let those hippies sit on top of our trailer, all the way back to Washington,” Ashley said.