Sun dapples and solar flare in Zion.
Jiggity Jig
We’ve been home for more than a week now, and I apologize for not properly wrapping up this blog sooner. Maybe I’ve been postponing the mental chore of admitting the trip is over, but more likely I’ve just been too consumed with the physical ones of figuring out how to live in the city again. Our house is full of our stuff again, I’m back to my old habits of sleeping in too late, I can find the nearest grocery store without consulting my phone, and the dog is thrilled to be surrounded by such familiar smells. As, I suppose, are we.
I’ve been wondering how to properly wrap up this blog, and my best idea so far has been to not wrap it up at all. Future Scamp trips will be documented, as well as general Scamp upkeep, solar tutorials, that sort of thing. But this first chapter is closed, and as a postscript, what follows is a roundup of the blog posts that were on my to-do list and that, somehow, I didn’t find time write.
1. The Map Post.
This was going to be the blog post in which I showed you all exactly where we went on our trip using Google Maps. It would’ve looked something like this:
The dots are where we stayed overnight.
And then I was going to add a bunch of numbers, because people like that kind of thing:
13,779: Miles traveled
83: Nights in the Scamp
28: States visited
4: Oil changes
2: Tires replaced
1: Visits to the emergency vet clinic
3rd: Average gear used
16: Average MPG
8: National Parks visited
-17: Coldest temperature (F) endured (in New Mexico, of all places!)
11,158: Highest elevation reached (the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 in Colorado. During a blizzard!)
2. The Prospective City List
This post was going to be a cutthroat list of the cities which, if I had to leave Minneapolis, I would consider as a living destination. It’s worth noting here that, if we learned one thing during our trip, and it’s a lesson we continue to learn in these weeks following the trip, it’s just how much we love living in Minneapolis. That said, the cities we saw that rank nearly as high:
1. Denver
2. Austin
3. Seattle
4. New Orleans
5. Portland, Ore.
6. Bozeman
7. Albuquerque
8. Santa Fe
9. Grand Rapids, MI
10. Sonoma, AZ
Of course, this is my personal list and does not reflect Danielle’s tastes. It turns out we don’t completely agree on this. She’d have Bozeman far higher, I think, and she wasn’t quite as enamored with Denver as I was. I could write a whole post on Denver—I don’t really know why I liked it so much. It just felt right, I guess.
3. The “Stuff” Post
In honor of my recently past life as an editor at a glossy monthly magazine, I used the harsh sun of the Arizona desert to conduct a photo shoot of my favorite consumer products that we used during the trip. It looked like this:
I even made a goofy little item guide…
…which I was going to use to illuminate all of reasons why l loved this stuff so much that I would give Scamp Face over to such crass commercialism. It was going to include touching little vignettes, like:
3) Orange Rubber Ball
This is Ava Pickle’s contribution to the photoshoot. She discovered this ball at our campsite in Bryce Canyon, and where she found it I’ll never know. I pulled into the campground, shut off the car, let the dog out, and by the time I was standing in front of the Scamp to unlock the door—maybe 15 seconds—Ava was sitting next to me, wagging her tail so hard that it gave her little shoulders a Carmen-Miranda-sized shimmy. This ball was in her mouth. It became her best friend for the remainder of the trip, rivaled in her affection only by the Scamp’s furnace, and was her constant companion whenever we ventured out into the world. Once, during a game of fetch, I inadvertently threw it into a large snowbank. She spent all of 20 minutes excavating it, and would listen to no pleas to give it up. She has never loved a ball as much as this, and it remains one of my fondest souvenirs.
It was also going to contain very practical information for you to use in your travels, including:
2) Boxed wine
Just as this box of Hardy’s says: “Portable, no corkscrew required, stays fresh for weeks after opening.” Perfect for camping, and affordable to boot. The Scamp bed isn’t exactly kind on the hips, especially after three months of flattening, and a healthy cup of red wine before bed is a far cheaper solution to this problem than the foam-mattress alternatives.
And:
1) The Orvis Portable Wooden Picnic Table
Turn any patch of gravel into a picnic spot with this awesome fold-up picnic table. Just $100 on Amazon.
4. The Post about the Murder Mystery I Never Wrote.
Thirteen thousand miles is a long way to go, and we spent much of that time listening to books on CD, mostly murder mysteries. As a result, I consider myself a bit of an aficionado. And it struck me that RV culture is ripe as a backdrop for a murder mystery. Their nomadic lifestyle makes for plenty of elbow room for a serial killer to operate; they’re all retired, which automatically makes them snoopy, and snoopy old people are a tried-and-true murder mystery trope; and finally, RVers love murder mysteries, virtually guaranteeing that a mystery about RVers would be an instant bestseller. I even have a title: “Early Retired.” Oh, it would’ve been good.
5. The Post about Traveling with a Dog.
Best tips: Check with National Parks before you go to find out whether dogs are allowed; use DogFriendly.com whenever you get to a new city; and when you’re in a grocery store, fill your pockets with produce bags. They’re perfect for dog poop.
6. The Metaphysical Post about Time and Happiness
I noticed at one point during the trip that I hadn’t been changing my contacts as much as I had while I was at home. Then I thought about it and realized this wasn’t true. On the trip I went through three pair, or roughly one pair per month, which is right on par with my Minneapolis contact disposal rate.
So why did it seem like there was far more time between contact disposals on the road? After all, I was have a great time, and according to the old axiom, time should have been flying, not slowing down. Just for fun, I made a chart demonstrating this conventional wisdom:
And then I realized that I wasn’t “having fun,” per se. I would have described my attitude as “contentment,” which I think is a bigger-picture state of being, whereas “having fun” is more micro. In other words, “having fun” is to weather as “contentment” is to climate. To maybe, while having fun speeds up your perception of time, contentment actually slows it down. Like this:
Which made me wonder: What happens when those lines meet? When your micro-happiness and your macro-contentment intersect, and time moves at the speed of, well, time? What’s that? Joy? Normalcy?
I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s where I want to be. Anyway, I really just wanted to make some charts, and it’s pretty funny the stuff you think about when you have so much free time that you find yourself sitting around smilingly dumbly, which I think I did a lot on this trip.
7. The Post that Pairs Photos We Took with Seemingly Unrelated Excerpts from Books We Were Reading
This was going to be a series, and it would’ve been pretty cool, the kind of exercise that conjures meaning where there was none before. Or maybe it would’ve been boring and frivolous. I don’t know. Like this:
The land would wear just so much architecture and society, and no more. In the Platonic republic of the United States, the land of limitless imagining where ideas were no sooner conceived than they became concrete entities, nature was not supposed to dictate the terms on which mankind could live with it… Swallows nested now in the wrecked houses of the theorists and high-hopers. Those who were left were marked out by their willingness to submit to the land’s terms: religious zealots, fatalistic European peasants, and soil addicts, farmers by incurable vocation, for whom the dry and treeless country had become their natural habitat. (Jonathan Rabin, Bad Land)
Photo: Colfax County, NM. Elev: 8000 ft.
8. The Wrap-Up Post that Answers all of the Questions You Have About Our Trip Plus All of the Questions We Have about Ourselves and America and All that Stuff
That’s just not going to happen, sorry. To quote Travels with Charley, which became as much a guidebook to me as the wrinkled Rand-McNally that lived beside Danielle’s feet for those three months: “When I laid the ground plan of my journey, there were definite questions to which I wanted matching answers. It didn’t occur to me that they were impossible questions.” We all venture out on the road seeking something, I suppose, and just what we’re seeking is one of those impossible questions, as is the question of what we eventually found. The answers, so much as there are answers, will come slowly, I think, and today is too early to pretend to have any. Similarly, “What was the coolest thing you saw?” is impossible to answer, but I’ve heard it enough already that I’ve formulated three interchangeable answers: The Redwood forests; two donkeys fornicating on our truck; and Danielle, every minute of every day, for one small happy portion of my life.
A Mitten in the Dark
A few days in Quartzsite, AZ—temporary home to 200,000 RVs during the last week of January—proved a little too much to take, and so on Friday we put the silverhairs in our rearviews and at last took that 180-degree turn toward home. By Friday night we’d made it as far as Monument Valley, where we drove past a “Road Closed” sign and crawled up a mud road to a primitive campsite at the base of the Mitten, the valley’s most photogenic resident. We knew it was out there because we were next to what used to be called the Mitten View Campground, and which is now the View Hotel and Resort (nice of them to leave this little dirt parking lot for us campers, though). It was about 9 pm and the moon hadn’t risen yet, so even after letting our eyes adjust to the dark we couldn’t see anything but the monuments’ giant shadows against the star-spangled sky. So I took out my camera, cranked the ISO, set it on the car (which serves as a great make-shift tripod at such times) and took the above 15-second exposure.
A lot more photos—most of them taken in the daylight—are at our Flickr photostream. (I apologize in advance for the smoochy Grand Canyon shots.)
The Grand Canyon is too damn big.
Maybe seeing it last was a mistake. Maybe touring southern Utah’s many canyons and carved red landscapes filled me to my stuffing point with natural beauty, and finishing with America’s most momentous crag for dessert was simply too much to take. Maybe I’m fed up with beauty. But seeing the Grand Canyon just flattened my vision. Often, when faced with such a scene, folks tell you that words can’t do it justice, that you just have to see it and behold it to get it. Even that doesn’t apply here, because seeing it did nothing to jolt my brain into getting it. I just can’t get a grasp on it, it’s that damn big. I’ve never seen such a volume of empty space, encased in such a variety of earthen shapes and colors and materials. It reminds you just how much of the world you’re missing when you stand on solid ground that hasn’t been chiseled out from beneath your feet by 5 million years of erosion; how when you think of “sky” you only think of what’s above the horizon, when in fact, in certain places, there is also sky below you. Vast quantities of it. Too vast to consider, even while looking at it through a tiny window at the top of a watchtower at its edge. It makes you want to scream into the canyon, or do what another tourist just down the trail from us did: Step to the rim, put his hands on his hips and declare into the void: “Holy shit!”
