July 9, 2015

Kalamazoo.  A beer town.  Everywhere I look there are small breweries. If it weren't in the dead center of Michigan I could probably live here.  However when I think about where I live and what I would give up by living here I stay put.  The Pacific Northwest is really one of the only places that in three hours or less you can get to multiple geographies.  A ninety minute drive west puts you on a Pacific ocean beach, much of it still wild and undeveloped.  About two hours drive North you are in an inland waterway, the Puget Sound, listed by Jaque Custeau as being the second most biodiverse place to dive in the world.  Ninety minutes takes you to timberline lodge near the treeline of the cascade mountains, while just North of us is Mount St Helens, an active Volcano, and Mount Ranier with a beautiful day park at Sunrise 6000 feet up on the flank of the mountain.  Just past the mountains you come to high desert which is beautiful and wild or if you stop in Bend very civilized with a cold pint waiting.
Don't get me wrong.  I love the midwest with its crazy weather and its crumbling cities, I think it has a beauty in its own way, desolate and flat, with the vistas of the Great lakes, inland seas of a sort stretching out and welcoming the winds down from the North, or the thunderstorms from the south to kiss its cities.