The Road is Long

We are on the road and the road is long.

Originally, we had plans to go to Yellowstone and then follow the Lewis and Clark trail and maybe hit up Portland and see giant Redwoods and drive down the coast. However, snow came early this year and M needed to meet a colleague in the Oakland office and Salt Lake City was nice but not quite warm enough, so we just put the pedal to the metal and trucked through Utah, Nevada and California all in one weekend go, briefly stopping in Reno, and collectively holding our breaths over the Sierra Nevadas.

Agile, they call it. Yes, we are pretty much always ready to pivot. To a fault, I think sometimes. But it was actually kind of fun to lay down some miles. Stopping for late night burgers at a McDonalds Casino combo truck stop and sleeping in a Walmart parking lot, where - no joke- somebody had a tent set up because nobody cares what you do in Nevada, apparently. When we woke up in the morning I stepped out of the camper and oh my goodness, the view of the sunrise over the mountains around the parking lot was absolutely breathtaking. There was was snow up there, and my breath made puffy little clouds. We did not linger, but kept moving until we got to Reno. We decided to stop for a few hours and check out this car collection museum. I don't really consider us "car people," except for the fact that we like driving around in them an awful lot, so I guess this really was a good museum for us to see. They had a cool exhibit about this 1908 automobile race that was New York to Paris. They had the actual car that won this race, in kind of beat up condition, although looking pretty good considering they drove 22,000 miles. There's a really cool painting in the exhibit of the car racing alongside a bunch of wild ponies in Mongolia. I wanted to buy a print, but there's literally no room left in the camper for anything. I have to go to the post office tomorrow, in fact, to mail things home.

After the car museum, we went searching for this burger called the Awful-Awful, which turned out to be served inside the smoky Nugget casino. Not entirely child friendly, but the burger was pretty good. Awful-Awful is a good nickname for the Reno experience in general, as we left the casino and passed people passed out all over the street and in the park. Police were sort of casually patrolling and waking people up, or as the case may be, summoning ambulances. The weather was lovely and we may have stuck around longer enjoying the little park near the Truckee river, but it was bad vibes all around. We hit the road and went up and over the mountains and didn't stop until Vacaville. We took a wrong turn getting off the freeway to go into the RV park and ended up driving very slowly around an entire almond orchard and some rice paddies, but it was a very cool impromptu lesson on agriculture.

And that's how your weekends go sometimes.

Now we are in Oakland. Reluctant to leave, because the weather is extremely pleasant here, and because M has an office here and we have friends here and it's easy to pretend this is just regular life.

Plotting a course back to Pittsburgh is daunting. The kids have seen the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota, driven alongside wild bison, camped in the Badlands, met a Lakota family, offered prayers to the effigy mounds and the spiral jetty. This afternoon, they played in the surf of the Pacific Ocean. Half the bucket list items and it hardly seems real. I was a young adult before I saw anything west of Ohio and I've wondered sometimes if this is just a long road to them, if I somehow robbed them of the awe they might have felt at 22, seeing the land drop away around the Missouri River for the first time. I am in awe, always, of all of it, but maybe I have an unusual infatuation with geography. Maybe this trip has nothing to do with the kids at all, and it's just me and M, needing to take another lap before settling in again. Like the way dogs circle their beds before they rest.