I thought I was going to see the Rockies. The road said go see the coast.

Every trip has a version that exists in Google Maps. That’s the one where the weather cooperates, the roads stay open, and Google Maps actually knows what it’s talking about.

This wasn’t that trip. Fire and smoke rewrote the entire eastern half of the trip. Nobody could agree on whether the critical link of NFD-25 was even passable. An unhappy battery outside Vancouver, a fuel gauge that ran the numbers a little too close outside Healdsburg, and more than one route that got thrown out somewhere between the planning and the riding. The trip that actually happened was better than the one on paper — it just took some recalculating from the map and I to get there.

These are the stories from that trip.