2009 started out as a year of discontent. I was living near Portland in West Linn, Oregon. I had given the Portland area two honest years, but wasn't happy there. I wanted to leave, and in January I decided that once my lease was up I would take the summer to figure it out. I wanted to travel again and the plan was put in motion.

On June 20th my daughter Ella and I left Oregon for a long journey across the U.S. We drove across Oregon, up through Washington, through a small portion of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, where this was taken. I took a series of photos along the way, all of them from the car while we were driving. Sometimes there were such long stretches of highway where we were one of just a few vehicles and it was such a great feeling to experience the open road.

Sometimes I felt like I was back in time. It was easy to look at the sparse landscape in Wyoming, free of city life, and imagine myself in a time when things were moving at a much slower pace. I was on my way to visit my 90-year-old grandma, and thought of her. I imagined that way out there in the middle of nowhere, things might have looked much the same when she was young, in that relatively untouched land.

I shot this image with my Coolpix digital camera and used the photo retouching on my MacBook to make the image appear antique.