Into the sunset....

Three years, 155,000 miles, and over 500 nights of camping later, we have decided to hang up our Subaru saddle and to swagger off into the sunset to discover long forgotten sensations such as the feeling of sleeping in one place for longer than four days. Words cannot even express what this whirlwind adventure has meant to us as we reflect on the trails, faces, small towns, sunrises, and inspiring work witnessed in our epic sojourn. We feel extremely fortunate to have represented the Center for Outdoor Ethics as we traveled through all of the lower 48 states in an effort to stimulate and inspire others to consciously consider how we recreate when visiting public lands. One can study the archived Traveling Trainer journal pages on www.LNT.org to see that we had a wide smile on our faces whether we were in a sweltering desert, on a snowy mountain, or the wilderness of an urban city.

So now that we have mastered the art of maintaining our entire lives within the space of a Subaru and re-emerging with no bruises or shredded wedding certificate, the question lingers….”What next?” Although we are a bit skeptical that anything could exceed this life-changing adventure, we are eager to tackle the challenges that many find mundane. Buying a shower curtain?! Shopping for an 8-roll pack of toilet paper?! Mowing some grass? Our levels of adrenaline surge at the prospects of simple yet sublime tasks.

Regardless of what comes next in the Grand Adventure, you can be assured that we will be roaming the mountains, exploring the coasts, trekking through the deserts, and quickly turning our head with an excited twinkle in our eye when hearing someone ask how they deal with their poop when in the outdoors. To play on an old aphorism, “you can take them out of the Traveling Trainers lifestyle, but you can’t take the Traveling Trainers lifestyle out of them.”

We would love to hear from all of you who we have worked with for the last three years and even from those who we did not. Contact us at dustyallison@gmail.com and amyallison76@gmail.com. Happy trails fellow Leave No Tracers and we look forward to our paths crossing yours again somewhere out there in the great wide open.

For the wild-
Dusty and Amy