Wow! It's been a while since we've found ourselves in front of a computer. But here we are in Pahrump, Nevada, 67 miles north of Las Vegas! We'll do our best to fill in the past 2 and a half weeks, because we've seen and done a whole lot...

We got a little too comfortable in Seattle, thanks to our amazing hosts Sasha and Tessa, and spent about a week just lounging, eating, running, and visiting Zach's AT friends Nick and Rachel. After leaving Seattle, we headed south to Portland, Oregon (which was an awesome city!), and then slowly worked our way down the Oregon coastline along US-101, camping at beach state parks. The Oregon coast was beautiful, and pretty much looked like New England beaches, except they were about 15 degrees cooler. Zach bought a kite in Newport and that replaced me as his new best friend for most of Oregon.

Once we reached California we camped and hiked through Redwood National Park, and then booked it to San Francisco! We spent the most beautiful day of our trip so far in Sausalito, hanging out at marinas and checking out boats. We toured San Fran by bike, along the bay, and scored a free bottle of wine and some local figs. Next we headed for Yosemite National Park in western California, which was Zach's favorite park. There were raging waterfalls, huge granite walls, cascading green rivers, quiet lagoons, and domes all over the place that provided awesome views of the park. Plus, we saw another black bear, ran into Sasha's friend Heather and got a free dinner and place to stay for a night (thanks Heather!), and hiked parts of the Pacific Crest Trail and the John Muir Trail.

Getting anxious to get to Vegas for our luxurious one night stay at the Paris, thanks to Nick and Dominique, we hightailed it to the desert AKA hell. If you want to know what it feels like to drive through Death Valley on June 30th at 2 pm at an elevation of -290 feet, turn the oven to about 200 degrees and climb inside. Seriously. We sweated for about 4 hours straight, because Zach insisted we leave the AC off and put the windows down to prevent the car from overheating. The wind was gusting at about 15 mph, but don't mistake this for a cool breeze...it felt like a blowdryer set on high hitting you in waves. You get the point.

Now we've got one more day of this infernal heat before heading to Las Vegas, and then St.Maarten for our sailing trip with Zach's family! We hope all is well back home. We're having trouble uploading all of our photos from the last 2 weeks, but hopefully we'll get that taken care of in Vegas tomorrow. Stay tuned...

~Nicole & Zach