Eighteen months ago I dragged a heavy bike onto a beach at the far northwest corner of Washington State. Among the sand and the waves and the chill of the early afternoon fog I reunited with the two of my favorite things: my girlfriend Desiree, and a life that doesn't require me to live out of a sleeping bag that smells like an unwashed crotch. It brought an end to a four-month adventure that remains the most interesting, most memorable, most conversation-worthy thing I've ever done. I've kept busy since then.

Within a month of coming home, Desiree and I packed up a moving truck, drove north from Seattle for a couple of hours, and set up shop in a modest apartment in Bellingham. There, in the city of subdued excitement, only a short drive or modest bike ride from the Canadian border, Desiree went back to school and proceeded to be amazing. She crammed about two years of post-grad college into ten months, all while pulling off straight A's, making a bunch of friends, and powering through the stacks of paperwork, arcane standardized tests, and painfully self-important statements of purpose you have to deal with if you want to get into graduate school. Even when pressured she wouldn't tell you that she did anything great, but I'm happy to do that for her. I on the other hand worked, ate a lot of pulled pork sandwiches and Mexican food, and spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to figure out if I was the oldest person in our neighborhood. (Almost.)

In March we headed to Southern California for a vacation, where we rented a house perched above the Pacific and invited a handful of immediate family and close friends to join us. On one of the days we forced them to sit in tidy rows of uncomfortable plastic chairs and listen to some really sappy shit that ended up in the two of us being pronounced husband and wife by an Internet-ordained minister who's also one hell of a great guy. Instead of jetting off on a honeymoon, we spent the rest of the week with parents and siblings and split time between important things like eating burritos, sitting in traffic, creating uneven sunburns, and gawking at homes and cars worth more money than all of us have earned in our combined lifetimes. At one point, while heading north along Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in a rented 15-passenger Ford van that smelled like waterlogged carpet mixed with sweaty feet, I cut off a Bentley driven by David Beckham. It was a true fairytale wedding.

As summer said goodbye to Bellingham, Desiree and I did the same. Another packed moving truck took us away from the rain and salt water and Toyota Priuses, brought us over the mountains, and dropped us into the ponderosa pines of Eastern Washington and the city of Spokane. We're here so that Desiree can spend two expensive, challenging, overworked, and, in the end (we hope), rewarding years in graduate school to earn an advanced degree in Speech-Language Pathology. One of us needs a real job, after all, and bike touring has just about ruined me for that. For reasons I'll explain in too much detail later, I don't care for Spokane. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that there's a countdown clock forever running in the back of my head, flipping over the numbers that mark the months and hours and days and sometimes minutes until we can pack up and move, well, anywhere else. Everyone I know is sick of hearing about it. Yet within these clouds of moping about suburbs and bad food there exists a lone ray of sunshine, a beam of light so bright and warm that I almost forget how to complain. His name is Walter White.

He's a dog — a West Highland Terrier — and he defines awesomeness. He's eight months old and has thick white fur everywhere except for his dark brown eyes and the end of his cold, wet, black nose. His legs are kind of stubby. If you talk at him with any inflection in your voice, his small head and giant ears rotate from left to right and back again at ever-increasing angles. Whenever we walk through the door — whether we've been gone four hours or three minutes — he becomes so excited that in a split second the ears drop straight down and then sweep back, tucked against his head and parallel to the ground like the retracted wings of a bird. He sleeps through the night, never chews on the furniture, and manages to stay good-natured even when my wife makes him wear embarrassing Christmas-themed dog sweaters.

As the story goes, the breed came about after a 19th century English gentleman confused his reddish-brown Cairn Terrier for a fox during a hunting party and shot the dog dead. To keep from making that mistake again, the guy created a terrier with similar traits but with white coloring to act as a sort of living do not shoot warning label. In the decades that followed, the dog took on more of a bullet shape, with shoulders narrower in the front than in the back. This lets it dive into holes at full speed and catch mice and other critters without getting stuck. West Highland Terriers also have thick tails, attached strongly to the base of their spine, so that on the off chance they become stuck in the ground you can give their tail a solid tug, pull them out, and bring them home alive and in one piece. None of these things come into play in or around our apartment in the city, but I mention them to drive home the point that this dog is amazing, full stop.

In the week after we brought Walter home, I told Desiree that I wasn't sure I could ever love a dog. I explained to her how I thought that there was probably a limit to what I'd give up to protect a dog — even my own — and that the limit was probably low. I'd never lived with an animal before; it didn't make sense to me. Well, you can add that to the long and growing list of dumb-assed thoughts that have come out of my mouth. He's wonderful — the kind of dog we always dreamed we'd have — and now it's hard to imagine life without him.

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Those who traveled before me swore that a cross-country bicycle trip would change my life. You'll think about it every day of your life, they said. One rider described the ride across America as their happy place — a series of sounds and images and feelings that help to remind him that the difficult parts of life aren't quite so bad, that there's a payoff to the aggravation. It makes sense. Regular every day normal life can't compare to the constant adventure, novelty, physical achievement, and deep satisfaction that come with wandering slowly across a continent under your own power. On the road, even the bad days feel like good days by the time you fall asleep. That doesn't happen at home.

When fall came around this year, work plans and outlines planted in the spring and summer sprouted and then blossomed into real deadlines. Because of that I didn't take a day off in November or December, not even for holidays. I worked something like 62 straight days at one point, often for 16 to 20 hours a day. I'd never hammered so hard or so long on anything in my life. As the crush and stress of delivering what seemed impossible dragged down my energy and the will to keep pushing, I returned over and over again to my happy place — to the rolling hills of the Georgia Piedmont; the comforting haze of the Blue Ridge Mountains; the generosity of the Cookie Lady of Afton, Virginia; the emptiness of Eastern Colorado; the vast blue skies of Montana; the characters I met only for minutes but will remember for a lifetime; and my willingness to say we'll see what happens and pedal off into the unknown. The thoughts of what I'd accomplished and experienced, and running through the idea of doing it all over again, gave me the fuel I needed to keep going.

Even though my life has changed so much since I stood with my bike on a beach looking out at the Pacific 18 months ago, the need to set out for the open roads of America burns stronger than ever. The time to make good on that desire is almost here. But first I have a sleeping bag to wash.