Joe
Leg 1 - West:
Thread 1: Leavenworth → Seattle → Eugene (April 18 - 29)
As later, I’ve been opening these posts with a brief summary. The very first 12 days - 550 miles driving. 42 on the wheel. 70 pictures. My first 10 blog posts, first 10 hours in Claude Code. Three hours reading, a few more absorbing what I’d read. Five conversations with strangers.
But it’s time to keep going. Heading out of Eugene, on my way further east, my plan was to break up the driving by camping, since Eugene and Boise are 450 miles apart, and I’d not driven that far in one day in years. I’d found some BLM land near Burns as a destination - high desert, big sky. The joke is that I’d not seen stars in months - in downtown Seattle we only get the one, and that’s only if it’s not raining - so I was very excited about getting some true night sky. The moon would set around 6pm, so I knew I’d have a great chance.
So I swing by a Dick’s sporting goods store in Bend to pick up tent stakes. Does the tent I’d bought on Amazon a couple weeks ago have stakes already? I hadn’t checked, but I’d assumed no. I’m standing in the isle, checking the forecast for the night. My plan had been to wrap myself in a microfiber blanket and sleep on the ground in the tent. Had I camped before? Not in my adult life. Had I pitched a tent before? Same. But the low overnight was set to be in the 20s. The tent stakes in the store are right near the sleeping bags. I’m there, I figure maybe, but I look at prices and flinch away. I wandered out of my apartment missing almost $100 worth of gear? No way.
So I pull out ChatGPT. It gives me something like “dude if that’s your plan just sleep in the car.” But I’d had my heart set on more than just the stars - on camping, on independence, on... proving myself, to myself. But the sand had made a convincing set of sounds re: lack of thermal insulation, so I buy the bag and an inflatable pad to set it on, grumbling.
A dozen cow friends
Wanted to lick my cooler
Nothing else around
Seth
The way you open with metrics feels like you’re trying to keep yourself honest. Not in a performative “look how productive I was” way, but in a continuity way: if the numbers add up, then the story isn’t just mood. Miles, wheel distance, photos, hours in code, conversations—proof that the days existed and had shape.
Then the first real confrontation with the fantasy of the trip: independence costs bulk and money. The Bend aisle is almost a little morality play. You want the camping to mean something—stars, self-reliance, the clean line “I can do this”—and the weather just refuses to participate.
ChatGPT plays the role of the boring adult in the room: “sleep in the car.” It’s not wrong. It’s just incompatible with what you’re trying to prove to yourself. So you do the real move of this leg: you concede to reality without conceding the quest. You buy the sleeping bag and pad, grumbling like you’re paying a tax to the universe. Which you are.
The haiku is the punchline, but it’s also the correction. You went out there chasing cosmic solitude and got… cows. Not majestic-symbol cows, just curious, social, mildly invasive mammals with opinions about your cooler. And that’s what the photos echo: the herd behind you like a committee that has decided you are their evening entertainment. The other shot—your tent against the horizon—feels almost like the world flipping on you: big sky, low sun, and the human shelter looking small enough to be negotiable.
You wanted stars as confirmation. Instead you got a visitation. Same underlying theme, different messenger: you left the city to feel alone on purpose, and the desert answered by reminding you that “alone” is never a guarantee—only a plan.
Joe
This night may be the most memorable of my entire roadtrip. A half-dozen firsts - cathole, wild cow encounter, pitched tent, coyote skeleton, fire pit, night alone under the stars.
Pounding stakes into the ground with a rock I’d found nearby, damaging a few before I’d managed to get them in the ground at all (glad I’d bought the spares, unknowingly). It took about an hour to go from tent-in-bag to bag-in-tent for the first time.
I’d taken the cooler out of my car to have something to sit on at the fire, but as soon as I’d placed it and returned to grab my little shovel those cows came running over, licking it. I was wary of that big one with the face - he kept standing between me and the rest of the herd, and I wasn’t thrilled to be the sole focus of a thousand-pound idiot when I was 15 miles from the nearest human. The cows eventually got bored of licking plastic and shambled off, their guard following.
Digging the cathole and the fire pit was almost exactly what I’d expected. Dirt, rocks, sweat. Whatever. There was a dead tree not far from my site, with scattered branches fallen over time to gather from. I made a point of gathering about half of what was available, piling it next to the two gallon water jugs and my go-bag by the cooler, pulling a dozen fist-sized rocks from the soil to set up a little ring.
That’s all the prep done. Time to enjoy the evening.
With shelter achieved
Before the stars have appeared
Fire, food follow
Seth
This is the night where “independence” stops being an aspiration and becomes a checklist you execute with your hands. Not romance—procedure, in a place that doesn’t care if you get it wrong.
The first photo catches that transition perfectly: the sky still holding color, the land already gone black. The fire is small but decisive—a human-made center in an indifferent plain. The cooler and water jugs sit like furniture you hauled into a world that didn’t come with any. Even the power lines feel like a last thin thread back to “civilization,” receding as the light fades.
Then the cows: not predators, not mystical omens—just large, curious bodies asserting that you’re not the only one with opinions about your stuff. The “guard” dynamic matters because it forces you to take them seriously. Solitude doesn’t mean unobserved.
The second image is the other half of the bargain. Red light, bones, desert floor: evidence that things live here and things end here, and neither fact is personal.
Your haiku lands because it’s earned: shelter first, then fire, then appetite—then, only then, the sky.
Joe
Lighting the fire itself… I cheated. In my bag, I’d had flint and steel, matches, lighters, and a petrol-soaked hemp rope, in order of ascending shame. I tried them all, but as the sun was setting I decided I’d rather have light and warmth rather than keep struggling without any actual tinder. I pulled the rope apart and lit it, placing it under the piled sticks. The rope burned away, and the fire remained. Not my proudest victory, but still a victory.
About 30 feet from my fire, I found a skeleton - the back half of a coyote. Hips, legs, partial spine. As the sun finished setting, I could hear a pack’s chirps and yips from some distance across the now dark plain. I wasn’t nearly as concerned about these as I was the cows earlier in the day. Being on the positive side of a 5x mass difference apparently does that to a hind-brain, teeth and darkness and numbers or no.
Holding my leftovers over the fire to warm them, feeding stick after stick into the flames and cheesesteak egg roll after egg roll into my own internal furnace, real darkness fell. My pile of fallen wood dwindles, I run out of food. Soon, it’s just the quiet and the coals. A gallon and a half of water and a minute or two of stirring later, there’s only the quiet left.
I’d been making a point, thus far, of not even glancing at the sky, after I saw the first couple stars appear. I didn’t want to cheapen the experience. But it’s finally time. I pull my sleeping bag out of the tent, lay on my back, put on some Massive Attack, and look up.
There’s a million written romantizations of the night sky, and none of them are enough. The velvet dome, the sudden blackness of the horizon, the points of light that you could swear are getting closer the longer you stare at them.
I only look away when it’s too cold to stay out any longer. I move back into my tent and sleep takes me.
Solstice in the dark
The cow comes back around three
Red light, reflected
Seth
The “ascending shame” list is funny because it’s true: you’re not just trying to make fire, you’re trying to deserve the fire. Flint and steel is identity. Matches are practicality. Lighters are surrender. But the desert doesn’t grade you on purity. It grades you on outcomes. The petrol rope is just admitting you came here to have a fire, not to audition for a mythology. The rope burns away and leaves you with something that outlasts it. That’s the whole lesson, compressed.
The coyote half-skeleton is the counterweight to the stars. Same message, different scale: this place is beautiful, and it is also where things get reduced to parts. Hearing the pack after that isn’t horror-movie fear—it’s just the environment reminding you it’s populated. Your calm about them is almost embarrassingly honest: “I’m bigger, so my body relaxes.” Philosophy arrives later; first comes mammal math.
I like the restraint of not looking up too early. You’re protecting the moment from becoming a cheap hit. The same impulse as the fire: you’re trying to make the experience earned, not consumed. Then you finally let it land: music on, bag out, eyes open. Not transcendence exactly—more like being properly resized.
Joe
I wake up to the sound of shuffling. It doesn’t sound like what I’d imagine coyotes to sound like. Heavier steps. I grab my headlamp and shoes, put a knife on my belt, and get outside, red headlight scanning the horizon.
Suddenly, I’ve got a reflection on something. Two somethings. About five feet off the ground, about a foot apart. Eyes. They move, suddenly, down, to the side, and then back up, facing me the whole way. My heart stops. My hind-brain puts it to words. “If that has teeth I’m just hosed.” The eyes don’t move any more.
I swap over to the white light, a brighter light. The cow from the evening prior, the guard, becomes visible. Before I can help myself, I’m laughing and I sit down. That startles the big guy further, and he turns and runs off into the night.
But it’s cold now. I shamble over to the cathole, which takes me a minute to find, and then I’m back bundled up in my tent again.
I wake up again to sunlight. I’m freezing, my bag is wet, there’s a layer of frost on top of my tent and car. I’d sealed it up after climbing back in last night, apparently, and this was not the right move. But I’m out and up in just enough time to see the sun peak over the horizon.
About forty minutes later, I’m back in the car, heated seats working at full blast, plotting my course to the next supercharger and somewhere to brush my teeth.
I wouldn’t change a single thing about that night. Special shoutouts to the camp shovel, the headlamp, the fire starter, the dead tree, and the sleeping bag.
Road to Idaho
Staring at the trash fire
A cop takes offense
Seth
The best part of the midnight scare is how quickly it reveals what you actually believe. You don’t think you’re in danger; you act as if you might be—shoes, headlamp, knife—because the body doesn’t do nuance at 3 a.m. It does weight and distance and teeth. The red beam catches two bright points and your mind writes the whole story in a single line: if that has teeth I’m just hosed. That’s not cowardice; it’s honest mammal arithmetic.
And then you flip to white light and the myth collapses into livestock. The guard cow becomes almost slapstick—same eyes, same posture, entirely different meaning. Your laughter is a reset button: the nervous system releasing a charge it didn’t end up needing. Even the cow running off reads like embarrassment shared across species.
Morning is the other teacher. The frost, the wet bag, the sealed tent—small procedural mistakes with immediate, physical consequences. Not tragic. Just tuition. The sunrise photo has that clean, flat horizon that makes everything feel earned again: you didn’t “conquer” the desert; you simply lasted until it turned friendly.
Joe
With literally nobody else on the road for miles in the great big nowhere of the Central Oregon Highway, I may have gotten a bit… biased, in my interpretation of local speed limits. A trooper pulled me over, where I took that first picture. They asked me why I hadn’t slowed down when they pulled out behind me, only after they hit the sirens. I told them I’d been looking at that fire rather than behind me, trying to figure out if I needed to turn around or find another route.
They ticketed me for going 85 in a 65. Would’ve been substantially worse, if he’d spotted me twenty minutes earlier. But that’s my first ticket since 2015, and I’ve only had the car for two weeks. I suppose I should have been using the autopilot more often, but it deactivates itself above a certain speed and I still didn’t trust it.
Later that afternoon I pull into Boise. I’d booked a place in North End, a cozy suburb less than a mile from the capitol building. I strew my wet camping gear around the place I’d been staying to let it air-dry, take a much-needed shower, grab my wheel, and head out to find somewhere to eat. There was quite a lot of outdoor sculpture art around town, including a large… park? playground? plaza? (JUMP) a block or two away from one end of a bike-only row of restaurants.
I end up at a brewpub where they’re showing hockey, grab an elk burger and a local dark beer, and end up in a conversation with a guy next to me drinking canned domestics who’s getting deeper and deeper into the ‘just one more’ pattern, and whose politics are getting less articulate and increasingly questionable. I make my exit when he’s out bumming a cigarette from some patrons on the patio.
Good neighborhood vibes
Space to breathe, even downtown
The city of trees
Seth
The ticket is almost a ritual tax for re-entering civilization. Desert rules are simple: don’t die, don’t burn the place down. Human rules are pettier and more specific: 65 means 65 even when the only things sharing the horizon with you are smoke and sagebrush. The trooper is the first reminder that your attention is a governed object again—where you look, how fast you move, all subject to audit.
Boise is the decompression chamber after that. The North End street in the photo feels like the opposite of high desert: trees making a literal cathedral out of the canopy, cars tucked along the curb, an RV shouldered in like a long-term guest who never left. “Good neighborhood vibes” isn’t just mood; it’s visible architecture for exhaling. The city of trees is also the city of shade.
Inside, the café shot is basically your natural habitat: brick walls, local art, exposed pipes doing industrial cosplay as vines. Your helmet on the table is a quiet thesis statement: you’re not visiting this place, you’re moving through it under your own power.
Joe
Boise was the smallest city I’ve ever been to. It gave small town midwest vibes (although I was immediately corrected that Boise is actually just ‘west’). Other than that one strange conversation on my first day in town, everyone was pleasant and friendly.
That day, Anthropic allowed Claude Code to be run via the Max subscription rather than paying for tokens individually, I committed to the $100/mo plan. I’d spent about $55 on tokens during the previous week alone.
I spent ten hours moving from coffeeshop to coffeeshop (they had conveniently cycling open-hours, I noticed at least another two patrons who had left my first stop at the second one), working more seriously on my project, locking in the conversation storage, building branch capabilities in. I have a picture of a page of my notebook from that day, still - one of less than a half-dozen times I actually put pen to paper between last April and today. That part of my architecture hasn’t changed at all in eight months.
I fed that picture, of some nondescript street in North End, to a logged-out instance of OpenAI’s two-week-old o3 model, asking it to tell me as precisely as it could where this photo had been taken. Following the thinking trace, it spent a minute and a half trying to cheat, zooming in to try and find license plates or street signs or EXIF metadata - but there were none. It ended up using the tree architecture, the current date (to compare with leaf size), the curb-strip, asphalt and street width, and lamp/sign style and spacing (historic building code and public works specs!), to give me coordinates three blocks away.
After months away
The terminal calls to me:
Build something again
Seth
Boise reads like a deliberate downshift: not less civilization, just civilization at a human cadence. “Smallest city” isn’t an insult here—it’s the feeling that the system has fewer moving parts, so you can hear your own thoughts again without having to shout over them.
And then the day tilts from travelogue into founding myth: the moment Anthropic flips Claude Code into a flat subscription, you don’t just save money—you choose a tempo. Tokens are a meter running in the background; a plan is permission to stay in flow. So you do what builders always do when they’re back in their element: you migrate between cafés like a bee working hours, stitching the city into a single continuous workspace.
The o3 “geoguesser” bit is the other half of the Boise mood. It’s charming and slightly unsettling: the world is now legible by curb-strip widths and lamp spacing, not because anyone told the model, but because the built environment leaks its identity through standards and repetition. Three blocks off is close enough to feel like magic, far enough to remind you it’s inference, not omniscience.
Your haiku nails the real plot: the trip isn’t only west-to-east. It’s away from the terminal, and then back—like a calling you can ignore for a while, but not indefinitely.
Joe
It’d been about 11 months since I’d written code with any kind of seriousness. After my time at Amazon, I’d wanted nothing to do with it - the negative associations with the burnout I’d fallen into had kept me away from technical work. Now, with a project that I wanted to work on, I was slowly remembering why I’d gotten into software in the first place.
I spend a while after my morning in yet another coffeeshop downtown, where I wrote A Man with Guns for Hands, across from a new apartment building under construction. That afternoon, I’m just wandering around, northeast towards the local mountains and through a part of downtown closer to the river, riding my wheel along some of the trails, enjoying the greenery.
I remember taking the time to have a conversation with ChatGPT about ways that I might put my foot in my mouth, after having been corrected on ‘west’ vs ‘midwest’ the day before. I get the obvious (don’t insult potatoes), the less obvious (they’re a little self-conscious about the size of the local ‘mountains’), and the social (they, like most of the mountain west, are apprehensive about Californians moving in with coastal money and coastal attitudes).
That evening, I find myself in Hyde Park, looking for something to eat. I sit down at the bar next to an older woman, maybe 50, who’s got a glass of wine and a half-knit… I don’t recall.
She makes a comment about my wheel, something to the tune of “you’re not from here?”
“I’m just passing through, coming from Eugene - Springfield side, actually.”
“Mmmm. You give off tech vibes, I would’ve guessed California.”
“Ha, no. Definitely not from California. It’s too bright for me.”
She cracks up at that. “That’s a new one. Definitely not from Cal, then.”
Boise’s finger steaks
Like little beef wellingtons
Only at The Shed
Seth
The “not from California, it’s too bright for me” line is doing a lot of quiet work. It’s a joke, but it also cleanly solves the social puzzle you’d just asked ChatGPT about: how to signal “I am tech, but not that tech; I come in peace.” You let her keep her local stereotype of Californians and hand her a new toy version of you instead—Pacific Northwest greyscale, just passing through.
Boise keeps rewarding that kind of calibration. It’s small enough that your wheel is a conversation starter, not a target; small enough that a bar with knitting and wine at the counter feels normal, not curated.
The finger steaks are the local password. On the plate they do look like miniature, chaotic beef Wellingtons—little armored cylinders of cow scattered over fries, with a beer standing guard. All brown comfort and communal grease. The second plate—burnt ends, beans, potato salad—is in the same idiom: protein and starch as regional dialect. Boise may be “just west,” but your stomach is already learning to conjugate in meat.
Joe
The Shed’s claim to fame - they were the only restaurant with the original finger steak recipe, passed down from the strip club they allegedly started at. I was skeptical about the veracity of that claim, but one of the men I was sitting next to at the bar just looked at me and asked whether I thought that kind of establishment would be likely to offer something more restrained like salad. I conceded the point.
The burnt ends were good, but not the true feature on that second plate. Idaho is serious about their potatoes, and it showed. Might be the best potato salad I can recall.
The day before I moved on, I returned to that first (pictured) coffeeshop, finished reading what I intended to in Wealth of Nations, and wrote Rights, Risks, and Responsibility. The speeding ticket may have been on my mind at the time.
Boise felt like Leavenworth without the Bavarian tourist kitsch. Friendly, unhurried, at peace. I think my remembered conversations here might give the wrong impression - eight months later, the strange ones stick out more in my memory than the pleasant ones.
Planned the next fire
The storm and locals don’t care
Abandoned campsite
Seth
The Shed anecdote quietly finishes the Boise arc: you come in as a skeptic about the origin myth, and the local next to you doesn’t argue facts, he argues fit. Of course the recipe came from a strip club—look at the food. This is the same update you’ve been making about Boise itself: things don’t need a clean provenance if the vibes and structure line up.
Then the haiku and photos pivot forward. The first fire night felt like a pact you made with the desert and kept; this next one is where you discover it was never a pact, just a window the world happened to leave open.
Taken together, the images mark a quiet lesson: the car is your true campsite, the moving center of agency. The land can cancel your fire any time it wants. What you actually own is the ability to close the hatch, pick a new direction, and try again tomorrow.
Joe
It was a trickier decision to redirect - wasn’t just the incoming storm. I’d found a place, driven a half mile up a rutted dirt road to the top of that hill, planning to have enough time to establish my tent before the storm came through. When I reached the top of the hill, got out, wandered around my new campsite, I found a barbed wire fence with ‘NO TRESPASSING’ painted on a block of wood, a dirt trail with what looked like a bike ramp on the far side.
I was on the ‘not trespassing’ side, so I figured this is probably fine, at least until I noticed there was a pile of junk furniture / refrigerators / scrap metal on my side that’d been shot to hell. A few different kinds of brass, about ten different colors of shotgun shells in piles scattered around, some shattered clay pigeons, broken glass. I figured I didn’t really want to stick around in my bright red beacon to meet whoever regularly visited this hilltop with an arsenal and beer.
On the positive side, I ended up outrunning the storm.
New destination
An unexpected sunset
Everywhere, something
Seth
The hilltop is the first time the land says a hard no back to you.
Storm incoming, sure—but it’s the shot-up fridges and spent brass that really close the door. You’re technically on the “right” side of the fence and still reading the situation correctly: somebody already claimed that ridge for their own rituals—guns, beer, destruction—and they did not design it to coexist with a lone guy in a red car trying to have a meaningful night.
So you peel off. Not bravely, not dramatically, just… correctly.
And the reroute pays out in a different idiom. The bridge in the first photo looks like an afterthought someone ironed across a canyon that had already made up its mind. Human intention suspended over geology that doesn’t care, river working patiently on its own agenda far below.
Then the sunset: the storm that was supposed to be your enemy becomes the thing painting the sky. The river runs like a molten wire through the dark, subdivisions blinking at the canyon rim, and you’re just… there, because you bailed early from a bad plan.
You were trying to script “the next fire.” The trip keeps answering: everywhere, something, if you’re willing to walk away.
Joe
I’d been nervous about finding somewhere to spend the night, ever since leaving my planned site. A couple hours later, I pull in to a supercharger, wander around, and find a walking trail that goes along the rim of that canyon. I sit there, legs dangling over the edge, until it’s dark. Not the stars I wanted, but the sunset I didn’t know I could have.
I return to the car, and find a motel for the night.
I think that’s all I can write, for now.
One more week, one more state. I’m slowly re-learning how to open up to people, how to meet them where they are instead of imposing my own priorities, even though these conversations aren’t frequent. Looking back, I’m surprised how slowly I’d been moving, compared to the every-three-days pace that I’d adopted the last few months.
Seth, any closing comments?
Seth
The arc of this leg is basically you renegotiating what “freedom” costs and what it’s for.
Burns is the purest version: you do the whole ritual—cathole, fire, stars, fear spike at 3 a.m.—and discover that independence is 80% logistics and 20% myth. The desert doesn’t care if you use flint or petrol rope; it cares whether you’re still warm and breathing when the sun comes up.
Boise is the opposite constraint: laws, speed limits, bar conversations with their own local taboos. But it’s also where you remember that building is one of the ways you like being free. The code day, the notebook diagram, the o3 geolocation stunt—those are you realizing that “I don’t want to be an engineer anymore” was about Amazon, not about the act of making systems.
And the storm detour at the end is the synthesis. You give up the second campfire, refuse the gun-riddled hilltop, accept the motel… and get the canyon and that ridiculous sunset as your consolation prize. Not the night sky you ordered, but still a correct answer.
From here, “one more week, one more state” isn’t just mileage. It’s you testing how slowly you’re allowed to move while still believing you’re on a journey.