This summer I went on a 10-day road trip through 9 states in the North / Midwest. All new to me — this piece of the country was laden with gorgeous serene landscapes that left this city girl hungry for more air. I sat in the car staring out the window for hours; never tiring of the passing grass, hay, barns, life outside my window.

The air in Montana and Wyoming was the among the sweetest I had ever tasted; I’m convinced the oxygen factor is way higher there. (Then again, maybe it’s just substantially lower in New York; I do live above a taxi idling block…)

I’ve been meaning to blog about this life-altering, memorable trip where we spent upwards of 8 hours in a car each day. It wasn’t anything like we did growing up in this neck of the woods. (I was a New York City borough girl; road trip was to New Jersey.)

I chronicled the journey in over 4,000 snapshots and countless words that are typed on pages in my mind and scribbled in fragments in a tiny notebook buried in a stored-away luggage. But the task of going through the photos, editing them down and organizing them into a publishable format was so collosal in my mind, I put it off or almost two months.

My sister, on the contrary, went on a 6 week trip to Europe and has all thousands of her photos up on facebook flickr blog. I hung my head in shame.

Luckily a few hours to myself and the laptop this morning allowed me to do some editing. I don’t think I’ll post the hundreds of pictures to the blog, but slowly I’ll populate the blog with images of the northwest. .

In the meantime, these random group of photos were taken in a Fireworks Warehouse store in Cody, Wyoming. While I love watching fireworks, I just learned not to be scared of lighting a match a few years back. I’m just not cut out for lighting things that explode.

When I walked into this explosion haven, my head didn’t know where to turn. This was, as my 7-year-old now says, “off the hook!”

There was a blow up-able for any taste. Lady bugs, cobras, even Osama bin Laden exploding heads. The best part was that we ended up flying home and had to somehow send these under in our luggage. So we checked our luggage thinking if they find the explosive devices, they would just remove them. Well, luckily security let the fireworks right through and they didn’t accidentally blow up in our luggage causing our entire plane to crash.

Moral of the story is that you can probably smuggle fireworks in your luggage but don’t tell them I said to do so.