Second thoughts?

Actually, more like three strikes and we're out. With the recent market crash, S&P credit downgrade, and the bat-guano crazy Michelle Bachman winning the Iowa straw poll (this last one truly the straw), we're pointing our car northwest in earnest.

Bachman apparently believes the gist of her favorite book, the 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins, who claims that the "South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War is known as the “theological war” thesis. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”


So, in spite of the fact that we're sad to leave all our friends and family behind, the pain of leaving is eased knowing we're also fleeing the resurgent nutburgers who inhabit a plurality of Iowa Republican voters. These tea-baggin' nitwits, are driving our economy into the ditch, and want us to spell culture with a "K" (or maybe three).


Read more in the August 15th the New Yorker: Leap of Faith.


Here're a few photographs from the past couple days (I'll finish the captions when I have time):

Yes, I am taking a third bike: my truck actually, for my new profession as an itinerant bike repairman: Spokes Person. Let me know if you have a better suggestion for a name.

After the bed and our tent, turns out all we had was boxes, which we intend to use for furniture.

Judy, displaying her corporate management training.

Mark, pod-packing master.

I love that minimalist look.

Wabi-sabi.

Why, you might ask, didn't we take the drapes?

Good to go. We actually pulled off at this scenic overlook on I-680 and I-29 because I never have and, well, I've got a bit of free time to kill. It wasn't all that scenic.