While growing up in Minnesota, with the exception of Disney World, my family only vacationed to the West. We’d cruise across the vast lands taking in the big skies and rugged mountains, we’d go to pioneer ghost towns and walk the cemeteries, we’d bask in the wonder of the natural and man made monuments -- cementing the ideals of the West into my adolescent brain. One of those ideals was to see life as an adventure; to search out the unknown.