…runs through mountains and along rivers and took us from northern New Mexico to Washington state. We drove north from Taos into the San
Luis Valley in Colorado and then over La Veta Pass to Interstate 25 to northern Colorado, a route we've traveled many times. Our household goods are in storage there
and we stopped to swap our summer clothes for warmer jackets and rain gear.
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| Sawtooth Scenic Byway, Idaho |
For the rest of the trip, we planned to visit parts of the country we hadn’t seen before on roads we hadn’t driven before, mostly blue highways. That term appears in the first line of the 1982
book of the same name by William Least Heat-Moon: “On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the
back roads blue.” He was separated from his wife, had lost his teaching job and wanted to change his life. He outfitted a van for camping and drove 13,000 miles around
the country on blue highways writing about people he met and
places he visited.
