Recap: Recently, I took a road trip through the Pacific Northwest with my former college roommate and have been writing a series of blog entries about the trip. To get up to speed, you can view my previous bog entries from the road trip series: Comfort Zone, Down Time in Seattle, A Day and a Half in Portland and Glamping: My idea of camping.

I always thought that someday I would go off the grid. When I'm frustrated at work or with family or traffic patterns on route 30, I think, Montanna: Where there are only 6.8 people per square mile. Of course, actually going off the grid is a completely different experience.

Through the wonder of Air B&B, we found a "village" to stay in near Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in Northern California, our next stop. In short, you can't find it using your GPS, the temperature changes by 10 degrees as you go over a mountain to get there, there is a small stream to ford, and cell phone reception is virtually non-existent. We were truly off-the-grid. My first thought, was, "Huh, zombies would never find me here" in a zombified post-apocalyptic world, of course. My second thought was "Oh my god, no one would ever find me here"!

Looking around, I took inventory of our new digs. A communal compost toilet and bath house, a full outdoor kitchen, a large organic garden, chicken and goat pens, and gravel paths with gates leading to a variety of small cabins. There were piles of construction materials and tools about for projects in various states of completion and the sun light was fading fast. It was going to be an interesting couple of days.