Day 1

Day: 1
Miles on Lucy: 62,741

The Challenge: drive across the United States in less than three weeks, seeing as much of it as possible while not wanting to kill each other

My wife, Catalina, and I are spending the next three weeks driving from our home in Ann Arbor to California and back, then directly to Pittsburgh for a good friend's wedding (Hi, Paige!). We're doing this for a couple of reasons:

1) We pride ourselves on being well-traveled, but neither of us have seen the US. We do what most people from the East Coast do- we fly over 3/4 of the country, go to San Francisco, and say we've been "out west"

2) We have a hybrid. Her name is Lucy, and well, it's cheap to drive that sucker across flat states. We are slightly worried about the Rockies....

3) The biggest reason is that I'm moving away to start Nursing school in Philadelphia in June. That means Cata and I will have to be apart for the better part of a year. We've done distance before (a year in Barcelona for her, four months in Bangladesh for me) but never for this long, and never after being married. We've talked a lot about this- if you're reading this we've probably talked to you- and we know it's slightly crazy. But we also found that it's pretty common for couples to have a period of distance at some point in their marriages. At any rate, we figured the best way to be alright with being hundreds of miles apart for months at a time was to spend three weeks locked in a glorified golf cart, 10 hours of it with a 7 pound dog and a pet fish named Cheese.

This..may have been crazier than we thought.

The Route: Ann Arbor--> Minneapois--> Rapid City--> Livingston--> Coeur d'Alene--> Seattle--> Portland-->Roseville--> Salt Lake City--> Denver--> Omaha--> Ann Arbor--> Pittsburgh--> Ann Arbor

We'll keep you updated on where we go, what we see, and the people we meet along the way. We want to learn as much about this country as possible, but more importantly, we want to learn even more about each other.

So, here it goes.