Fall 2011: The XC Leaf-Peepers Trek, and other autumn adventures

When we left home in mid-September for our 7-week cross-country road trip, summer had just made an appearance. Our garden hadn't yet begun to produce much: beans were just starting, tomatoes were still hard and green, NO zucchinis. We told our across-the-street neighbors that the garden was now their produce stand, and we drove off feeling oddly disoriented – how could fall be here already, when we'd hardly begun to enjoy summer??
Amazingly, in our 45 days of travel, we had only five days of rain (well, four of rain and one of snow...). We heard later that for those who'd stayed at home in the NW, the ratio was pretty close to the opposite! Our trip was everything we'd hoped for, and more than we'd dared expect. Only the flying fell short, but apparently we didn't do much worse than we'd have done had we gone nowhere.

Here are the scrapbook pages (as I complete them) from our big adventure. We put 10,000 miles on the Trooper, and took literally thousands of photos between us. It was a fabulous vacation!