The year in review:

Started practicing guitar daily. Hitchhiked for the first time over the winter. Moved out of House of Ninja through the back boiler room window. Couch surfed through tax season, worked my butt off. Rekindled internet addiction. Fell in love online. Hitchhiked 2800 miles over the course of a month, spending a lot of time in Tennessee along the way, where I made awesome people friends and also adopted my doggy, Charlotte. Stood in and ate stuff out of the Atlantic ocean. Finally met Becky in person, the most amazing woman in the world. Been living in a beautiful forest in a neat little town called Keene in New Hampshire with her, my dog, and her rat for over a month, with some awesome forest dwelling neighbors not far away. Doing lots of little road trips around New England to have adventures and get experience with that kind of travel. Life is awesome.

And the reason I decided to blog now:

Becky and I were driving back from Bar Harbor, Maine. An absolutely beautiful place, even if we didn't find any starfish or hermit crabs. The only place I've seen stars like that before was at my camping spots 15 miles north of Flagstaff where the sky was really dark. Drove through Acadia National Park for free cuz no one was awake to take fees from us so late at night. Saw the red sun rising out of the ocean at dawn. Explored the general area deliriously for a little while. We were all tired and looking forward to getting back home, resting when we needed to, and when we were getting to Portland we started hearing warnings about tornadoes. Stopped at a burger king to stretch legs a bit, but things got scary. Lots of really low fast moving clouds at first, and then we could literally see the clouds lowering right overhead, the whole thing moving quickly, the wind picking up, air pressure doing weird things with our ears. We ran back to the car, threw everything back in, payed the toll at the booth and drove away in the fast lane. Police interceptor = awesome car for running away from tornado spawning clouds.

When we were getting close to Keene, there was another emergency system warning about severe thunderstorms in southern New Hampshire, headed south east right for the area we were driving through. I had to stop and stretch my legs again, but not for long this time. Behind us was an enormous puffy thunder cloud. It was night time but we could see the whole thing perfectly because it was constantly flashing with lightning in at least one part of the cloud, almost like one of those glass globes filled with electrical arcs that follow your fingertips. The scary part was that it was getting bigger and bigger as we watched it because the whole thing was flying straight toward us. When the road was dry we went fast, and when it was wet, I wished it was dry so we could speed up. The storm was behind us but I could still see the flashing lightning reflecting off of trees and smaller clouds in front of us. I completely forgot about my legs cramping up from all the driving.

The adrenaline aftershock kept me on my toes for a long time even after we outran the big storm, but we were worried there would be a lot more of it ahead. We could see a lot of lightning coming from the clouds ahead of us as we approached Keene. Luckily the rain had let up by the time we got to our parking spot, and there was more distance between us and the lightning than it looked like by the time we were walking up the trail. We made it back to camp with time to spare before the rain started smacking into the tarp overhead. Lightning occasionally illuminated the inside of the tent, a wonderful breeze came through the screen mesh of the window. I fell asleep with Becky and Charlotte safe and dry on either side of me.

And here we are alive in the land of Starbucks wifi writing about it. It's not raining anymore but there's plenty of clouds going overhead and light breeze to keep the air cool. Charlotte's tied off to a tree outside, occasionally chewing on a stick. Sometimes she looks up to shake her head at me cuz she'd have written the story much better than I have if she were typing it. She's smart like that.

So yeah. Life. :D