The first day of a long journey

As promised I have restarted my "trek" from coast to coast. I know that the location tag for this post lists Seattle, WA, but I just did that for "poetic license". I will geo-tag each update for this part of the blog based on where I am along with the updated picture above.

I did make a few changes to this route since I wanted to "spend more time" in Idaho given that so many important things in my life have happened there (don't worry my New Mexico friends, when I am done with this "journey" I will do another one in the southwest states). This did make the overall trip a little longer and is now a total of 3,137 miles. That is a ton. Again, my goal is to make it there in a year, maybe a little less.

Alyssa and I did start off the week well with a trip to the park. It's the first of three runs in our second week of the Couch to 5K program. My legs were still pretty sore from a weekend of hiking, but it went pretty well. It was nice to have a change of venue; I think Alyssa did much better. She said she wants to warm up a little more before we start by doing pushups! That girl is amazing. She even wanted to do "track tag" again; I don't know where she gets her energy.

I also promised to share a memory each week based on the location I am in for the Cross Country "Run". I have only visited Washington a handful of times, but it has almost always been for some big event. The main one I remember was when my older sister, Heidi, got married; I was 15. I had seen the Pacific Ocean before, but that was in San Diego. The ocean water in Seattle is just a little bit colder. What was so memorable about this particular event was when we were on a ferry ride to one of the main islands in the bay. It was very windy and our wind-breakers filled up with air giving us the illusion of being Mr. Universe. Down in the water, though, we saw something that I had never seen before in real life: dolphins! They were amazing. I didn't have my own camera, otherwise the picture below would have been of the dolphins we saw. Instead you get to see the amazing buffness brought on by raging wind power! (I'm the one in the maroon and navy blue jacket, sorry you can't see my face)