Part graduation celebration, part final hoorah with my best friend before I moved three states away, the eight-day cross-country trip took us farther than we could have imagined. Leaving our home in Cincinnati, Ohio, we went through the surprisingly green hobbit-home hills of Kansas, the blue mountains of Colorado still covered in snow, the Arizona cacti popcorning the horizon — all the way to Las Vegas, so bright and sparkly even the postcards glittered.

We’d planned to bring a cooler of groceries and tent-camp four of the seven nights we’d be traveling, and we were only going to spend one…