Years ago, when I graduated college, my father and I took my white convertible on a cross-country road trip. We wound down the East Coast towards New Orleans, flew up through an empty, hot Texas, and landed in Santa Fe. I ate burritos with green chiles for breakfast, bought dreamcatchers by the side of the road, and found a hot pink fringed shawl to wrap myself in when the sun set and the desert air turned cold. When we reached the end of the line, we parked my car outside a grey apartment building on a side street off of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. We unpacked boxes and assembled Ikea furniture, and when we were done I tossed that fringed shawl across the foot of my bed and it instantly felt like home.

What's so crazy about this summer is that we've been on this wild journey, pulling our hands off the wheel and taking roads that we won't be certain make sense until we find out where they lead, and this feeling of who-knows-where-we're-going isn't just confined to our living situation: it's our life. Coming with us everywhere we've been these past couple of months is a person whose face we've never seen, and who, in just a few days - hours maybe - will be a bigger part of every moment of our days than we can possibly imagine, right now in the just-before. I have no idea who she'll be or what she'll do to our hearts, but I am certain that she will make everything different.

Right now we're coming to the end of another long journey, and we're nervous and restless and all the things you'd expect us to be, but we're also wandering together through sandy mountains, laying in a bed that doesn't belong to us and feeling the foot of a family member we haven't met yet move under my skin, riding ponies and breathing in ocean and drinking milkshakes in the mornings. There's so much upheaval and uncertainty, but it doesn't feel uncomfortable, exactly - it feels like it's just how it is right now, both because of where we are and because of us. It couldn't be any other way, but even if it could...I wouldn't want it to. That's been the most surprising part of all.

{ Scenic overlook en route to Half Moon Bay }

I've heard about the San Francisco fog, of course. But still…I didn't expect it to be quite this dramatic. The first time we drove from San Jose into the city, Indy saw the dense cloud of fog that hangs over San Francisco and said to us, "Look! The clouds are coming down!" Which is exactly the kind of thing that the child in a Stephen King novel says before some apocalyptic event or another, and the fog was already making me think of one of my favorite King novellas (The Mist, where a dense fog rolls across a lake, bringing with it murderous creatures and more or less the end of the world), so...

Shiver.

Just because it's not July 4th doesn't mean you can't wear red, white & blue. (I mean, if Reese Witherspoon can do it…right?) It's tricky, though. If you're trying to show just a touch of patriotism (or are simply into this particular color combination) but don't feel like going the full-on Party Like You're An American Flag route, here's how to do it.

- Build the outfit around a single color (red, white or blue - I went for blue here) and use the other two shades as accents.