Prologue: Bouncing Into Graceland....

This is a blog about Melissa (me), Rob (my best friend and husband) and Penny (our pooch). We have packed up our car and are traipsing across the country to have adventures and maybe find a place to call home someday. If all goes as planned we will arrive in Eugene Oregon from Boone North Carolina in about three weeks. In other words, we are taking the archetypal road trip across our large and majestic continent in search of our own humble version of an American Dream...what that will entail I haven't the faintest.

Despite our best intentions of living fast and dying young, we have found ourselves married, with a dog and a Subaru. We have a bank account and AAA. We are both college graduates. We don't smoke and barely drink. So, inevitably we found ourselves with clear heads and plenty of time to daydream and think about how we would like to live our lives together. We decided that we wanted something other than working in restaurants and passing the time at the Boone Saloon.

What we want is big. Audacious. Completely unreasonable.
We want to homestead. We want to do this in close vicinity of others who do the same. Others who, like us, feel like the most of the "normal" options for how to lead one's life in America are completely insane, not to mention unsustainable and destructive to everyone and everything involved. I want to be able to support myself and my family by teaching yoga, growing herbs and vegetables, and providing others the opportunity to learn to do the same. Rob wants to raise hogs and cure his own pancetta and learn how to turn corn into liqour. Penny wants to frolic in fields of wildflowers and roll in dead stuff in the woods.

We think we might be able to do this in Oregon. This is based mostly on hearsay and rumor, as neither my husband nor I have ever even been there. I myself haven't even been west of the Mississippi since I was 6. But here we are, driving down Route 40. We are in Brownsville TN this morning. Unfortunately I don't have much more to say about this place. Rob is saying it's time to get on the road. He is anxious to get to Memphis, where we are going to the Rendezvous to eat some of their famous dry rub ribs.