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Lorelei broke up with Colin after five years. I could hardly believe it.

Lorelei is such a good friend of mine, and has the esteemed distinction of being the only person who ever lived with me for a whole year and never got in a fight with me. (I think I'm best in small doses.)

As soon as I found out, I told her we'd better get out the fuck out of dodge and go camping somewhere as soon as possible. That turned out (a month later) to be this weekend. I figured this would be the only way to hear and tell the full story about our breakups and subsequent life.

I picked her up in Bellingham and we drove out in WA-2 through such lovely towns as Concrete and a strange faux-western town called Winthrop, where we unfortunately stopped for coffee. I wanted to take a couple of photos of Winthrop, but Lorelei talked me out of it, on the grounds that Winthrop was the kind of place where one should go and then leave forever without a trace.

Finally we made it to our first destination, one of the rare free campsites, near Loup Loup in Eastern Washington in time to see an eerie moon rise above the lake.

For dinner I was going to make Heartbreak Soup, a kind of salty beet soup for which I can unfortunately not reveal the recipe. It's inspired by a Love and Rockets comic story by the same name. It is a healing balm for heartbreak, but as she and I began to get stoned on the ample Sake we brought, it became clear to me that she was at peace with her breakup, and I was mainly making it for myself.

Indeed the last long road trip I went on was one of many with Roseanne. Like this trip, I was the sole driver on our many road trips, since at the time, Roseanne did not drive. Sometimes the memories (of her elaborate road snacking setups, her massaging my upper arm while I drove and started to get sore, and her appreciative looks while I drove for hours and days on end) were almost too much to bear. What can be done but to go make new memories and make heartbreak soup?

Lorelei and I got ourselves good and drunk, ate the soup with drunken gusto and laughed about stupid jokes from years ago. We peed drunkenly in the bushes, talked about our new hotties and policies, and actually spoke very little of the past.

Finally we fell laughing into the tent, and I had many strange dreams that I can only half remember. I woke, bleary and cold, to Lorelei pushing against the side of the tent, and something sliding down the side. I was uncomprehending, and only half aware of her putting on outside clothes and unzipping the flap.

"It's snowing," she said.

I got it together. The hangover gods had been quite kind to us, but our campsite was covered in snow. We had left things out, and we scrambled to get snow off of everything and get everything packed up in the car in some kind of order. Cooking breakfast on the burner was out of the question, so we first had an ill-fated breakfast and another ill-fated coffee attempt in Wenatchee. I got gas, left my debit card in Okanagan, and we headed out into the wilds of eastern Washington again, looking for somewhere breathtaking to walk around in.

We found it in Dry Falls National Park. It was, in fact, truly breathtaking, and we took pictures at a view point before heading into the park proper.

It was such an mellow, spooky grey day, and the palette of the park was such a rich mix of muted colors of moss, lichen, rocks and grasses everywhere. The air smelled sweet with the fragrant smells of wormwood (vital ingredient of absinthe).

Realizing, after driving around all day in the gentle rain, that nowhere in all of Washinton state was going to be dry, we came back to Seattle, had a hot pizza at Santorini's, and camped blissfully in my warm bed.