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It originally was going to take 77 hours, but we got stuck in Boise overnight because the wildfires engulfed our route. It was a welcome delay at that point. Greyhound put us all up in a hotel for the night, it felt incredible to be able to lay down. I'd been sleeping scrunched up on the bus seat for three days, and when I finally laid down in the hotel room, I reflexively did so in a fetal position just like on the bus. I'm incredibly thankful for the super professional driver we had, who went above and beyond to find us all rooms. For once greyhound impressed me in a positive way.

I have so much to say about this experience, but nobody will read if I keep babbling. Sometime soon I'll write all about the old alcoholic army vet who befriended me me, the guy who paid for my sandwich and restored my faith in humanity if only for tonight, the trench foot, and a bunch more stories that my sleep deprived brain can't even recall right now.

I've felt just about every emotion a human can feel on this trip. I even got to pass through my papa's tiny hometown in bumfuck Illinois. Saw the fields where my great uncle accidentally shut himself in the foot. He later developed gangrene, and passed during an attempted amputation on the kitchen table. I cried when I saw those cornfields.

Somewhere in western Colorado, where the landscape resembled the pyramids of Giza to me more than anything I'd ever seen before, I thankful to be alive for the first time in years.