It was a beautiful night in Moscow as Mikey and I attended the show we’d have bragged about significantly more a decade prior. Fortunately, we enjoyed it nearly as much at age 26 as we would have at age 16. Watching freshmen interact was half the fun, but that deserves a post of its own.

Ladies and gentlemen, Eve 6.

The Palouse’s rolling hills provided a fantastic backdrop for our 45 minute drive from Moscow to Lewiston. All the area wheat farmers are in the process of harvesting their crop for the season, which means the fields are a stunning gold. I hope the day I get used to the beauty I’m surrounded by up here is far off… but I digress.

To Brewfest!

What’s a lentil, you ask? Sadly, despite several people’s attempts at explaining it to me, I’m not quite sure I know.

As far as I’m concerned, it is a small version of a bean, with which an entirely acceptable form of chili can be made. Each year at the Lentil Festival, Pullman’s downtown streets are filled with locals who are welcome to enjoy, among other things, a free bowl of lentil chili that is made in a massive, 350-gallon vat, and stirred with an oar by notable townfolk.

Masses, I give you small-town America at its finest.

One of the many luxuries the northwest affords its inhabitants is the ability to go rock climbing without having to drive three hours to get to a crag. This past weekend we took a day trip up to Post Falls, ID to climb at Q’Emiln Park. The weather was unbeatable, the surroundings were beautiful, and I managed to capture a few images of Climber Colby — not to be confused with Karate Kick Colby — climbing on Identity Crisis (5.10a).

When you’ve lived in a certain place for a while, you get to know your grocery store intimately: you know the best places to park, you can navigate the store with great ease, you know exactly where the milk is, you know which cashiers’ lines ought to be avoided… it is familiar. Safe.

I remember my first trip to the grocery store in Philly. Not only did I have to worry about navigating a new store whose aisles went not just front-to-back, but side-to-side as well, I also had to keep in mind that whatever I bought was going to have to be carried 2 blocks to the bus stop, on the bus, and 2 blocks to my house. I remember how that trip to the store ended, too. I managed to botch up the check-out process somehow, and saved face by telling the cashier that I’d just moved here from Texas, and I’d never been to a grocery store before. Her response was something to the effect of, “why the hell did you move to Philly?”

Typical Philadelphia.

Yesterday I went on my first trip to the grocery store here in Moscow: the WinCo. Driving up to the store I remembered my friend telling me about the near-breakdown she’d had in the very same store, sparked by an inability to find anything, so I proceeded with caution. As I entered the store I was greeted by a massive, floor-to-ceiling aisle of impulse buys, right off the bat. It was there, not 15 seconds after making my Idahoan grocery debut, that I found family-sized boxes of name brand cereals for $2.00. That, for those of you who don’t eat pool-fulls of cereal a month, is a killer deal. Any insecurities I had related to being in a new place were immediately outweighed by the amount of money I was going to save on my kiddie cereals.

Then I turned the corner and saw the rest of the store, and I was reminded that I was familiar with neither my surroundings nor the manner in which locals maneuver it. There were moments in which I felt everybody in an eye-shot was staring at me. I was less crippled by their gawking however, as I was by the nonsensical system that had been used to merchandise WinCo’s goods. The greeting cards and the lady-napkins were on the same aisle. I wasn’t in the market for either of those products, but had to go down the aisle because for all I knew, El Fenix salsa would be in there somewhere. It wasn’t.

When I made it to the cookie aisle I saw, down on the bottom shelf, a familiar product that I’ve mentioned here before. The packaging was different, but I saw through the plastic wrap and knew that those were in fact the very store-brand vanilla cream sandwich cookies that I’d grown to love over the years. I placed the luxury item in my cart.

Once I’d made it to the checkout counter and began to empty my cart’s items onto the conveyor belt, I realized (as I do on each of my trips to the grocery store) that I am very much a bachelor child, as evidenced by nearly all of my grocery store purchases being cans or boxes — nothing fresh, nothing healthy. I mean, you’re allowed to have some store-brand vanilla cream sandwich cookies in your cart if they’re next to some cucumbers and tomatoes or something… but mine were next to Apple Jacks and Totino’s Pizzas.

Still, I came home that afternoon triumphant that I’d spent merely $55 on over a week’s worth of groceries, and I rewarded myself with three of the aforementioned cookies. By the time I’d gone to bed last night, I’d had no less than ten cookies. The taste of familiarity in the midst of a foreign place is therapeutic, after all.

This morning at precisely 3:00 I woke up with a dreadful stomach ache. I am so rarely sick, I’m often confused when my body doesn’t feel right. This morning, however, the confusion was short-lived, as the ten cookies I’d eaten just hours before came to mind. Every time I sat on the toilet this morning, I thought about how I not only shop like a child, I have the self-control of one as well.

So moral of the story? If you find yourself in a new situation, with new surroundings and unfamiliar grocery stores, it is never okay to drown your sorrows with fistfuls of store-brand vanilla cream sandwich cookies, no matter how “at home” they make you feel.

You’re welcome.

Most of these photos were taken from Skylar’s driver’s seat as we drove. And drove. And drove.

If you’d like to follow our progress in the form of pithy sub-140 character updates, @derrickoliver and @colbyivey will be live-tweeting the journey for all to enjoy.

Enter Friday afternoon. All the campers had been picked up at the church by their parents and several of the counselors had gone to share a post-camp celebratory meal at an area cantina. When the meal was over, people left the way they would leave any weekly gathering: hugs, handshakes, and I’ll-see-you-later’s. It was in that moment that reality began to set in. I knew that I wouldn’t see (m)any of these people later. They were leaving the restaurant and re-entering the normal they’d left behind while at camp. I was leaving to revisit the limbo in which I was to be living for a mere five days longer. While the people I was saying goodbye to couldn’t have known it, it was they who set into motion my encounter with reality.

Since I had no place to lay my head for the nap I so deeply desired after lunch, I walked across the parking lot to the movie theater and bought a ticket to Pixar’s highly anticipated Toy Story 3. At some point during those 103 minutes of computer-animated brilliance, every ounce of reality which hadn’t hit me already came at me like a train. I wiped more tears away from beneath my 3-D glasses than ever before during a movie — whether 3-D or not. I’ll spare the details for those who’ve not yet seen the film, but suffice it to say that as Woody interacted with his (fake, toy) friends, I could think only of my own (real, human) friends, the ones I’d just parted ways with and the ones to whom I’d be saying good bye very shortly.

By the time the credits had rolled, I’d put myself back together and was ready to visit a not-so-local coffee shop to debrief my uncharacteristic display of emotion. I sat down and wrote pages upon pages about how I’d ended up being the mid-twenties, single, bearded guy who goes to see and cry through children’s movies by himself. And while I didn’t write about it, I could have spent some time recording how I’d become the mid-twenties, single, bearded guy who goes to coffee shops by himself to cry and write about crying… it was really a series of shining moments for me.

The result of all these tears and word-writings was an overwhelming spirit of thankfulness to the Father for putting such incredible friends in my life. The fact that I have people about whom I feel so deeply as to cry at the thought of not seeing them anymore is extremely humbling. I do not remotely deserve the quality people who have let me be involved in their lives over the past 4 years in Dallas.

So Friday began a beautiful weekend of grieving a blessed season which has come to a close.  I now feel like I can load up that moving truck and drive away from Dallas with the peace of knowing I’ve finished well here, and look forward with much anticipation to what the Good Lord has for us in the northwest.

Bittersweet.