Philipsburg, Montana is hundreds of miles behind us as we drive, wipers brushing off the driving rain, sports radio commentary analyzing last night’s Saints vs. Panthers game on, as we hurtle towards California in a muddy Toyota Tundra.

Winter as we know it is also behind us. Today is Nevada. This is high desert grasses, bail bond billboards, isolated agricultural towns fronted by blinking lights advertising 24-hour casinos. We pass prisons. My eyes follow white, bare houses on tussock hills, then stay on the trains that smoothly parallel us as we move alongside lines of oil tankers. We are all going west.

There is no snow here. When we stop at gas stations and get out of the car, there is a smell of damp earth, shrubs and trees, all the earthiness that gets buried under white in Montana for most of the year.

We’ve been working steadily from mid-December to prepare for this getaway, and yet it was nine hours into this road trip before I felt the cut and release that always comes when I leave a place. I feel that flick of addiction. There’s a reason that people stay on the move all their lives.

Is it change?  A fresh start? New territory, maybe, or a return to a piece of ourselves that gets forgotten or put on the back burner until life slows down a little bit. And out here it does. Suddenly there is nothing but empty hours to let our minds churn things over, to take an idea and run with it.

Such as: getting out at the gas station in Elko, I think about what it would be like to live here. To work at a hotel reception, or the blackjack tables, or the supermarket checkout. Then there is this playful, new fear – every time our GPS tells us the fastest route would be to take this narrow dirt road on the left, just up ahead –  that surely by now there is a serial killer tech-savvy enough to lure a road-weary couple right over a cattle guard and onto his compound, where a gate will clang shut behind us.

We pass by oil fields, steam springing up, and I think back to a short story I read in my early 20s, about a woman who takes a job in a place just like this. I remember how that story made an impression on me. It was lonely and had a sense of bridges that had burned behind this woman. The theme was isolation. But I remember it was also a story about escape. She had survived something. As we drove, I just couldn’t remember what that something was. Or what the story was called. Or who the author was. There is no cell reception or coverage out here, so I can’t even do a Google search. So I sit back, trying to piece that tale back together from memory.

That’s what this time is for, hours and hours on the road, relishing in the rarity of being bored and seeing where that goes.

In another five hours we will be at the ocean. In seven hours we will pull into the gravel of my parents’ driveway where a porch light will be on, and bowls of ice cream will be brought to us by the fire. In the morning, I’ll be able to go for a run without putting on snow boots and three layers. I can slip on running shoes.

Even writing that last paragraph reminds me how wealthy I am in time. When it passes this slowly, I can’t help but be aware of it slipping by.

And this is just the first leg of a five-week journey. We are going west and south, and then really, really south. Southern hemisphere south.

But before all that, there is this. A slow re-awakening to a world outside of winter.