where I finished, more or less, the painting for the Pieces Of Our Lives, Amy Grant, benefit and started a few new small pieces.

Just after my post, Cliff picked me up on his four wheeler and hauled me up to the very tippy top of Wineglass Mountain where we shared whiskeys and stories until sunset on the deck of his little cabin overlooking the valley and mountain ranges reaching clear back to Wyoming.

I felt so much for that mountain and the people on it that I squeezed in an extra day.  Waking up to a flat tire made me smile.  I like to think Wineglass didn’t want me to leave.  But I am proud to say I changed Ms. Liberty’s first flat tire (with a little help from Cliff) and hit the road around noon.

As if she had not already been generous enough, Amber Jean set me up with her old forrest ranger buddy, Yogi, in Swan Lake, MT.

Yogi is very literally the human incarnation of Yogi the Bear. Seriously.  His voicemail message goes something like this (in a very jolly tone):  ”Hey hey hey, Yogi’s at work or at play, but he’d still like to hear what you have to say!”  There has never been, nor will there ever be, another Yogi. I feel fairly certain this is a fact.

My timing was such that I got to tag along with Mr. Yogi to camp in the old Mission Lookout Tower that sits mid-way up the Mission Mountain Range facing the Swan Mountain Range not far from Glacier National Park.  This was fascinating enough, but the cherry… it was a full moon.

We shared pear brandy until the moon got good and high, then we howled our faces off! complete with barks and yelps, the whole nine.  When we finished there was a moment of silence followed by a symphony of reciprocal howls.  Then, a few seconds later, from further in the distance came another round of howls answering the previous howls. Neato!  The tower is for rent year round, but requires a good bit of advanced booking.  I think its around $30 a night and is worth every penny.  For a couple in love I think it would be a seriously romantic adventure.

We spent the next day in Glacier National Park.  This is the park to end all parks.  ”Going to the Sun” road terrified me to the point of nearly climbing into the driver’s seat with Yogi.  I am sad to say I could hardly look out the window.

We took a 4 mile hike down to St. Mary’s Falls where, on the way back, a huge dear launched out of the brush across the trail about 10 feet ahead of  me sending me back another 5 feet and checking my undies.  The ride back up “Going to the Sun”  was much more relaxed.  So much so that I rode standing up out of the sunroof, which I highly recommend.  I saw my first bear, a black bear, noshing on huckleberries (I sh*t you not, Yogi’s face lights up with joy at the slightest mention of huckleberries) along with a few mountain goats, a bald eagle, all against the backdrop of endless mountain ranges that just don’t translate on camera.

I regret not spending more time in Glacier to hike, but its not recommended to hike alone, especially this season, too many bears.  I’ll just have to go back.

After a sleepy farewell to Yogi as he left bright and early to tend to his forrest ranger duties, I hit the road to Seattle.  Driving through Idaho was definitely a low point.  Although I did find great consignment shop and a delicious little bistro called Papa Byrd’s in Bonner’s Ferry.

Enter Seattle.  I LOVED Seattle.  Soaked up some quality time with one of my oldest friends, Ally.  Met a new friend, Faye, who guided me all over the city to visit and meet with a handful of top notch galleries.  One of which represents Darren Waterston!  Darren Waterston is my favorite living painter and this was my first opportunity to witness his work in person.  This brought me very close to more weeping.  One of the gallery employees was kind enough to dig out every piece of his work in the building.  Faye and I sat on the floor and poured over every little detail.  It was equally pleasurable to watch her have her first experience with Darren Waterston’s work.

We followed up with an absolute smorgasbord of vietnamese goodies and juicy champagne cocktails at www.longprovincial.com.  If you’re ever in Seattle, near the Market, you will not be disappointed, and say hello to Robert.   Ask him to make you a Juliet. Its named after yours truly! champagne, peach vodka and muttled basil. yes.  We finished the evening porching with more champagne on Capital Hill, loving on Capone the cat and playing with the coolest remote controlled helicopter thats only about 3″ long and hovers like a black hawk.

Apparently you can pick one up for $20 on the street in Hong Kong.  Nerdtastic.

Now, I am here at Tiny’s Coffee Shop in Portland looking forward to a weekend of  wine and art with Jonny & Pearl.

Officially I am working my way back toward Nashville.  I have mixed emotions about heading home.  I am seriously considering moving to the mountains.

I passed along to her my audio copy of Eat. Pray. Love. which felt like a lesser reciprocation, but it has been the perfect companion on this trip and after all, the trailer for the film was a catalyst for this journey.  We are keeping in touch along our respective journeys and it is a great comfort to know she is out there, hopefully experiencing similar majesty.

While in the Badlands, I found a scenic spot, climbed up onto Ms. Liberty’s back and painted for a few hours before sunset on my first day.  On my way back to camp I got stuck in traffic with upwards of 150 of these stubborn beauties.

I worked in some great hikes and a farewell hang with my new friend and headed west toward Montana.  A detour through the Black Hills seemed in order as it would include a drive by on Mt. Rushmore and more importantly! the city of Deadwood.  I was such a huge fan of that series and had to see Deadwood.  While it wasn’t the most amazing place, it was still quite beautiful and I found a great junk shop where I found loads of treasures to bring home to my friends that I miss terribly.  The owner of the shop directed me to Beulah, WY for free camping where I found another peach of a spot, right on the waterfall at Sand Creek.

I bathed in it’s crystal clear, icy cold water after my morning run and felt… no words.  On my hunt for firewood I was directed to The Trading Post where I found no firewood, but a massive entry way into the coolest dive bar EVER called, brace yourself, Saloon No. 333.  You may or may not know that I am mildly obsessed with 333′s.  I was born at 3:33. I always manage to look at the clock at 3:33.  I see them everywhere!  To stumble on this smokey little 333 dive bar in the middle of nowhere where the vodka tonics are pint sized and only cost $3 a pop, brought me great pleasure.  And I have to note that the exit number for this heavenly place I am currently writing to you from… its 333.  But I’ll get to that.

So, I pick my barstool and to my left is a nice looking, friendly fellow in his 50′s named Ron.  Yes, another Ron.  Ron is that guy.  The one that everyone in town knows and loves who has lived in Spearfish, SD, about 5 miles down the road, for his entire life.  Ron became my accidental tour guide for the following 48 hours during which he carted me all over Bell Fouche and Spearfish, SD on the back of his 1970-something Harley Davidson shovelhead? whatever, is was cool.  He took me to breakfast, coffee, helped me find firewood, let me raid his garden and introduced me to his best friends, Dom & Kim, who invited us over for dinner.

I went back to my campsite, painted for a few hours, then Ron picked me up on the bike at sunset.  We headed back to Dom & Kim’s for a delicious chicken dinner with cucumbers and yogurt, tomato basil salad from Ron’s garden and sweet onions and vinegar that cooked in the belly of the chickens.  mmm…

Kim is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen with long dark hair and legs up to her ears.  She is an incredible Mother, cook, weight lifter?, wine drinker, Elk gutting artist with two of the coolest teenagers on the planet.  Rudy, her 16 year old son, wants to be a screen writing metro sexual or maybe a gynecologist.  He has an arsenal of handguns and buck knives in a safe in his bedroom that he was very excited to show me, and clearly has one of the biggest sweetest hearts of any 16 year old I’ve ever met.

His younger sister is Dominique. Dominique, or Isabella Swan, as she proudly introduced herself, has Downs Syndrome and is totally obsessed with Twilight.  I fell completely in love with this 14 year old girl who showed me her sketchbook full of horses and whitetail deer, cuddled with me by the fire and let me braid her hair.

She sang songs in the kitchen while Mom danced and Dad played backup guitar.  That snapshot of this beautiful family is the same one that brought tears as I hit the road the next morning to Montana.

I find myself weeping a lot recently.  The tears keep coming in these moments of overwhelming joy like I haven’t felt for a long time. Too long.  The next wave of tears came after I took exit #333 into Livingston, MT.  I’m driving up the mountain on a little gravel road listening to Bill Callahan’s “Too Many Birds” flanked by horses and its right at the peak of sunset.  I had to stop about every 50 ft. or so to take it all in.  You must witness a Montana sunset before you die.

My friend Wynn has a dear friend, a sculptor named Amber Jean (www.amberjean.com), who lives here in the mountains in a magical little log cabin.  I am not exaggerating.  This place is a spiritual Mecca.  Amber has lived here since she graduated from art school about 14 years ago when she met a logger named Cliff.  This was Cliff’s place.  They met fighting forrest fires when she was a parks ranger and now they are like family.  I have not met Cliff yet, but am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to share a glass of whiskey with him as I have been strictly instructed by Wynn.

AmberJean is living the life of most artists’ dreams.  Her work is in high demand, she was recently flown on a private jet to Texas to put her magic touch on the lives of some wealthy entrepreneurs.  Her reliquaries are magnificent and presently her main focus. They are carved out of massive 12′ logs that open like giant upright coffins, and house all sorts of goodies inside.  She is a bright golden smiling beauty and tough as nails manhandling these monstrous logs in her warehouse studio.  She has already been a generous ambassador for me in the local gallery scene.  I spent half the day yesterday following her directions to recommended galleries and introducing myself while taking in some killer artwork in downtown Bozemen.  The other half was spent at the warehouse where Amber and Stacy share studio space.  Stacy is a burgeoning encaustic painter that let me play in her studio and try my hand at wax media.  I am not good at wax media.  Stacy is gifted with wax media and was generous, patient and just generally cool as hell.

There is a separate little cabin down the road from Amber’s nicknamed “Granny’s Place”.  Cliff built this little hideaway for his mother years ago and it will be my home for the next few days, it’s front deck will also be my studio.  I will remain here in heaven until Saturday morning when I plan to power through to Seattle.  Who knows where I may stop along the way.

right on top of this sandy bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.  The spot was offered to me for free! by the Campsite Host, who shall remain nameless, at the Mackinac Recreational Campground. Indeed, nothing is ever free.  While I did enjoy my visit to that stunning place in perfect weather and even got a little painting done, a good bit of the magic was sucked out of the experience by the host fellow, a seemingly harmless man in his late 60′s.  I don’t want to speak badly of a person that was so generous to me, but I cannot not mention here how offensive and discomforting his “sense of humor” was when he was “only kidding around”.  His ever-presence and rude comments left me feeling compromised and, at night, wondering if I was in fact being spied on.  When I hit the road again, it took a lot of miles and many hours of driving to shake off the soul sucked feeling.

A few days before I left Nashville I had the pleasure of meeting a beautiful family of art lovers thru my friend Martin. The 76 year old patriarch of this family is a man named Ron Carlson,

the friend of a friend’s…  I had the even greater pleasure of spending a few days with Ron, who is a stark contrast to the previous host I have just described.  I don’t know how to put into words how much I admire and sincerely enjoyed my time with this man other than to say a part of me fell a little in love with him.  I was welcomed by his entire family into Camp David for the family pig roast, went rafting down the Black River the color of sweet tea from all the iron mining, climbed to the top of Copper Peak’s ski flying jump www.copperpeak.org, hiked down to Rainbow Falls, strolled the shoreline of Lake Superior for a couple hours, then dined on pasties at Little Girl Point.   The U.P., as they call it, is border to border unspoiled nature that I am happy to know still exists in our country.  We ended the day at Ron’s favorite watering hole in Ironwood called the Brite Spot where we drank, laughed and danced until after midnight.  Ron is the perfect gentleman, a wonderful dancer and a breed of man I thought only existed in movies.  I will be back in the U.P.

Southwest to Minneapolis is where I stayed at the hostel and met the lovely George from my previous post.  The much hyped gallery scene in Minneapolis was mostly non-existent as far as I could tell.  After struggling for hours to find a single gallery in the “Arts District” I gave up and went to The Walker Museum.  I was blown away by this Rauschenberg piece

so much so that I tried to leave the room three separate times but kept getting magnetically pulled back in.  I spent a fascinating half hour tucked in a dark hallway conversing with an oracle-like animated dolphin through a wireless keyboard.  This is difficult to explain, but trust that it was pretty amazing.

I met up with another friend of a friend, due to the wonders of facebook, for dinner.  My final night in Minneapolis was spent with the adorable Christopher Carr whom I now get to count among my friends along with his teeny little yorkie, Weezy, whose cuteness overpowers her rank breath.

Now I am sitting in an overpriced hotel room in Mitchell, South Dakota.  So far, I wouldn’t mind deleting the entire state.

Today I am headed out to the galleries.  The rain has stopped so I should get to it.  I cannot wait to fill you in on the Upper Penninsula and my 76 year old husband.

The Island

When I found time to break from lazing with my trashy romance novel (The Villa, Nora Roberts) in the crisp 75 degree weather on Raven’s Rock (the island belonging to the family of my best friend Tricia) I began the first paintings.  One of which is for the upcoming Pieces of Our Lives fundraiser www.piecesofourlives.com.  The other was inspired by artist Tom Thompson, a member of the legendary Group of Seven famous for documenting the Canadian landscape in ways that will certainly influence my work throughout this trip.  Truly Inspiring.

The cabin was family built in the 50′s and houses 3 bedrooms, a washroom, a kitchen with a view that idealizes washing the dishes, a living room/ dining room, screened in porch that hangs out over the river and a back deck guarded by a giant rock man.  The sunsets there are unlike any I have ever witnessed.  The porch is a front row seat and it doesn’t get dark until almost 10:30.  Sitting at Mrs. Patricia McDonald’s easel and mixing paint on her pallet in her family’s history soaked inner sanctum had me feeling pretty sentimental.  Being an honorary Haggard and eating my fill of buttery southern Paula Dean style cooking wasn’t bad either.  The number of emptied wine bottles is… none of your business.

The island directly across the river is owned by  the most statuesque bad-ass 71 year old woman.  She and her daughter attempted to teach me to wind surf.  After roughly 2 hours of almost surfing, mostly getting pummeled by the mast, I watched her gracefully tack up the river nearly the full length of her island.  I was barely able to walk for the remainder of the day and most of the following day.

Our last night was spent surrounded by friends and family from most of the surrounding islands, drinking cocktails and swapping stories.  Perfect send off.

Toronto

It is becoming a tradition for Tricia and I to spend one lavish evening in Toronto on our way out of Canada.  This year on the way there I had to stop and pick up a new alternator for Ms. Liberty.  I definitely have angels because we stumbled upon Bento’s 24 Hour Auto Mechanics where Fidel and his band of merry Portuguese men made having car trouble feel like being in a sitcom.

Digs: http://www.gladstonehotel.com new favorite

Dinner: http://www.thedrakehotel.ca/dining in the SkyYard

I really love this city.  It feels like Brooklyn, but cleaner and the people are super friendly.  The cherry, it is riddled with vintage clothing shops.  Mama like.

I dropped Tricia off at the Detroit airport, powered through Michigan and detoured to…

Chicago

A short but sweet visit with an old friend in a new life.  There was a lot of bourbon, beautiful people and laughs, lots of laughs.

Next?

I am sitting in a wi-fi friendly McDonalds just over the Michigan border about to determine my next destination.  Its looking like Manitou Island.  It came highly recommended.

Packed and ready to roll.  Hitting the road to Canada at 5:00 am. Eh?  Mr. Mike Luckett built and installed the most amazing shelves into the back of my little Jeep Liberty (who will now be referred to as “Miss Liberty) to house all of my canvases and panels.  Eh?  Eh.  Big thanks to the genius of Andy Martin for his shelf design.  Its a peach! G’night.

Here is where I would like your help.  Beginning with Detroit/Ann Arbor I will head west through Wisconsin, South Dakota, Montana all the way up to Seattle. (where a highlight will be a long overdue visit with my old friend & SVA roommate, Ally) To Portland, and down the coast of northern California I will go weaving my way back toward Tennessee.  But not before I stop in New Mexico and northern Texas to hug the necks of some favorite family members.  That said, I want to hear all about the places that mean something to you, especially if they are within a reasonable distance of this general path.  If a particular place moved you, or you’ve always wanted to see it, ride it, hike it or swim in it… I want to hear about it.  It could be anything at all.  My promise to myself is to complete a minimum of two paintings a week, and there are no rules.  I am going to document the continent and bring it back to you in the only way I know how, paintings.  What would you like to see in them?