It’s fitting that my blogging and real-life friend Kelly introduced me to the expression “Leap, and the net will appear.” Not much leaping has gone on here for a while, but it was an innocuous message from Kelly a few days ago that launched a swift and thrilling decision to meet her and husband J in Malta just four short weeks from today. That has, in turn, prompted my first blog post in quite a while. Not exactly a high-wire act, but a pretty nice shot of adrenaline after these last few years!
Lake Tahoe: the last place we saw Kelly and J
I go through phases of throw-caution-to-the-wind leaping. There are times like the one where I decided on a whim to cash in my airline miles and fly for 48 hours in order to meet other blogging friends Lisa and Fabio on their sailboat off the coast of Madagascar for a week, and other stretches when I settle into a safer existence in which any sort of impulsive decision-making seems irresponsible or just too damn hard to pull off.
Madagascar: Lisa, Lexie, lemurs!
Jumping back onto the blog feels scary and impetuous, too. I’ve drafted plenty of posts that fizzled out mid-composition in recent months; they just felt boring and uninspired, perhaps because my blog is about travel stories, ideally set in exotic or far-flung locales, and all I had done in the last several years was drive our car back and forth across the U.S. and western Canada.
You’ve read all about my road trip addiction, the pull to the west as summer gets underway, the call of blue byways when the days are long and a sense of giddy adventure rises in my chest as we exit a new hotel on a warm morning. But even the granddaddy of our road trips to date (over 5000 miles, starting in Houston and making our turnaround in Whistler, British Columbia, and in between big chunks of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Utah) failed to inspire a riveting, or even good, tale. A little follow-up drive of some 3000 miles up the spine of the Appalachians was equally beautiful … and equally devoid of mass interest. You’ve been there, done all this driving with me before!
Sure, it was fun and very scenic at times, and the people part has been great. Lots of family, some more bloggers like Alison and Don in Vancouver, our now-IRL pals Pam and Sean in Oregon, my 29029 gang at Whistler Mountain, and my best high school and college friends in Montana and South Carolina.
Vancouver and Whistler probably did deserve a write-up; they were first-time destinations for me and were breathtakingly gorgeous, but I just couldn’t flesh out a compelling story.
Bend, Oregon was a photographer’s dream, the southeast and Appalachians offered somewhat fresher driving routes, and there was even a new grandbaby visit in there for good (the best) measure! Still, a narrative eluded me, photo essays aren’t really my stock-in-trade, and personal stories have been mostly off-limits here.
In our non-travel life, we’ve been contemplating other big leaps as well. Our reason for establishing a second base in Colorado two years ago (our son’s growing family) suddenly disappeared when he took a new job in Ohio in July. That tipped the east-west scale a little farther to the right, with kids now in San Francisco, Ohio, and Boston, and precipitated a now-endless discussion of whether we should stay put in the middle of the country to be able to fly quickly to any of the three places (really four, since my parents are still in Pennsylvania) or try to move somewhere where three of the four could be reached by car in a day’s driving? With my husband J’s job allowing him to work from anywhere these days, we began to contemplate a relocation, but we know better than to follow peripatetic children, and part of our mostly-practical selves keeps saying to be patient.
I think we can sit on that decision a while longer, but the overseas travel itch was not as easy to push off. Perhaps a sudden or last-minute opportunity is more conducive to decision-making, at least in our household. We can’t seem to make dinner plans with friends or neighbors for months on end, but when one of us suddenly proposes an outing that evening, it works! In this case, Kelly casually suggested we join them, I latched onto the idea, J was impressively open to it, and two days later, everything was booked … I hope she really meant it! Next post from Malta!
It was finally time for a more comprehensive tour of the western U.S., especially now that Covid was on the wane and we had a mini-HQ in Colorado from which to depart. We’d seen a decent assortment of places out west over the years; in fact, no state we would see was a stranger to us, but we had never committed consecutive weeks of time to just rambling around the region.
The Itinerary: Our schedule and destinations were predicated on seeing friends and family in a number of cities, and I had the added incentive of spending some active, prolonged time at higher altitudes to prepare for a mountain event I planned to do in Idaho in the middle of the trip. I drove from Houston to the Denver area in late May, spent a week in our little Colorado abode, and trained in the foothills on my own and with a fellow event participant. I loaded up the pup in early June and headed over the Rockies to Salt Lake City and on to Boise, Idaho, where I stopped long enough to pick up my husband at the airport and walk Boise’s mellow, refreshing Greenbelt for an hour or two before setting off once again to make Bend, Oregon by nightfall.
After three days in Bend, we meandered through southern Oregon to Crater Lake National Park and on to Northern California and the Mount Shasta area. San Francisco was next, a city stay that still featured plenty of hiking in Muir Woods and Angel Island, and after the weekend, we pointed the car east to Lake Tahoe. A stunning drive north into Idaho landed us in the Sun Valley/Ketchum area, where we split up – husband and dog to a nice hotel for work and some play, and me to my Bald Mountain hiking challenge and decidedly less cushy lodging (a tent). Four days later, we followed the Salmon River on a jaw-dropping drive through the Sawtooth Mountains to Bozeman, Montana, and a few days after that, we were traversing the Beartooth Highway, northeast and northern Yellowstone National Park, and then western Yellowstone and the Big Sky area. The incredible Tetons were our final stop before returning to Colorado after three glorious weeks.
Friends and Family: A big part of our motivation to stop in the places we did was to see our kids and some old (and new) friends. As a bonus to start my trip, I overlapped for a few days with our daughter and her husband who were visiting Colorado, and I also got to spend some joyous days and evenings watching our one and only granddaughter try to take her first toddling steps with our older son and his wife. In Bend, we reunited with friends with whom we had done volunteer work in Costa Rica and Mexico, and in two minutes, the twelve years since our last get-together disappeared in a rush of old memories and fondness.
A weekend in San Francisco was our first chance to see our younger son’s new life since a job change during Covid took him cross-country with his girlfriend. In the Lake Tahoe area, my fourth-ever blogger meet-up was a big success; Kelly (Compass and Camera) and I had always joked that we must be sisters from other mothers, and I think our dinner together supported that notion! “The Js,” our two husbands, got along great also – always a plus.
My J got together with an old work colleague and friend in Sun Valley, and I must note that in the first two days without me, he managed to fall and skin his arms and legs on both a trail run and a mountain bike ride (and people think I was the crazy one doing the mountain challenge …). In Montana, we had a too-short visit with my dear, best friend from high school, and we arrived back in Colorado just a few days after grandbaby E became a bonafide walker (hiking with Gigi cannot be far behind!). What a fantastic way to add love, friendship, and context to all the new places we went!
Travels with Tashi: We got a new puppy last spring, and I am still not used to the complications he adds to our lives after more than a year, even after being a former dog owner for fifteen years. The two-and-a-half-year gap between dogs must have spoiled me because now I can almost not tolerate having to think about his schedule and all the gear we have to haul around for him, especially in a city hotel where the car is nowhere near the room.
Still, he was a trooper. Like our other pup, Tashi is great in a moving car, on some days chilling in his crate on and off for up to nine hours while we stopped in small towns and pulled off the road for one of my 7 million photos. We introduced him to various cabins, hotel rooms, and strangers’ houses over the weeks on the road, and he was impressively nonplussed. After a few attempts to hike with this energetic little guy, we gave up and left him in our accommodations while we did the longer trails because he is still in the eat-everything stage, and one night of severe illness was enough to dissuade us from trying that again on this trip.
Yes, he is small, but the chair is enormous!
Hikes Galore: Our goal is always to find a hike or two anywhere we go, and this trip produced the goods. In Bend, our friends pointed us to Smith Rock State Park, which exceeded all expectations by a mile (or five). The climbs were a great warm-up for me, afforded stunning views, and wound us through all sorts of rock formations (see “Monkey Face” below) before a steep descent.
Crater Lake offered a series of snowy walks, which we had to let Tashi enjoy with us. Being from Houston, he found the cold, wet stuff to be a captivating novelty, and we were happy to give up some longer walks to see him scampering around the rim of this enormous, deep-blue lake. (Hard to ferret out cigarette butts in the snow anyway.)
Our SF son knows we are not content to just sit around and eat at fun restaurants (which we did both nights), so he took us to Muir Woods to reprise the Dipsea Trail hike we did a few summers ago, and he tacked on a nice, steep descent and climb back up out of a woodsy ravine to end our morning. The next day, he and his girlfriend booked us all a ferry ride to Angel Island, where we biked and hiked the entire island on a crisp, sunny Sunday.
Kelly pointed us to many, many hikes and other sights in the Lake Tahoe area, and we ditched Tashi again to marvel at the scenic east coast of the lake on the Tunnel Creek-Sand Harbor walkway, hike down into the Emerald Bay area, poke around Sugar Pine Point State Park, and take an easy amble through more historic lodges at Tallac Historic Site at the end of one day.
In Sun Valley, I hiked Bald Mountain more times than I ever need to again (fifteen, to be exact), and J got in some solid elevation on Proctor Mountain and then Bald Mountain himself when my event was over. Like a normal person, he summited once, but he did have to get down on his own, which is a knee-buster of a descent.
Bozeman was my cool-down, but we had to get a few little hikes in, trekking up Drinking Horse Mountain trail for a grand view of the Bridger range in the morning and capping the day with a sunset stroll up Peet’s Hill, a local mound that was surprisingly satisfying and enjoyable … and we even let Tashi do this one with us, lucky little guy.
In the big national parks – Yellowstone and Grand Teton – we mostly took abbreviated strolls with the dog, snapping photos at turn-outs and walking short distances from there. We did sneak away for an easy four-miler at Taggart Lake one morning at GTNP, and it was a beauty.
Lakes Galore: I knew we had Crater Lake and its deep cobalt waters on the agenda, but I hadn’t stopped to think about all the magnificent lakes we’d ogle on this trip. Lake Tahoe – Big Blue itself – was a worthy rival for the Oregon national park site, and many smaller lakes on the trip caught our eye as well. From serene and still to deep and powerful, the lakes all reflected and magnified the splendor around them and quickly became a highlight of the trip.
Big Skies and Wide-Open Spaces: The West is dominated by its skies, and we couldn’t get enough of the clouds – from pale, wispy strands to pregnant white poofs to looming gray masses – adrift on the overhead sea. Entire days passed with us seemingly inside an Old Master or impressionistic painting – the vast fields lime and lemon hued, the pines adding a punch of dark green, the peaks a bit of stony punctuation, and the waters a mirror of that gigantic canopy of sky. The expansiveness got under our skin, and we both commented on how hard it would be to go back to city life and its confined spaces.
Geothermal features:Hot springs and geysers have never attracted me much, but the spectrum of colors and ethereal mists at Yellowstone were a worthy addition to my “geo-art” series of photos over the years. I might have snapped more pictures here than anywhere else on the trip, and that’s saying a lot with Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe’s over-the-top photogenic appeal.
The “road” in roadtrips: I love a good non-interstate, and we naturally hit a lot of “blue highways” on this trip and went out of our way to drive others. Highway 75 from Sun Valley to Redfish Lake, Idaho, a twisting ascent up through the Sawtooths and over Galena Pass, was one such treat (secondarily because we had absolutely no cell service for hours, so there was no temptation to be distracted), and it was followed by an equally-isolated drive that followed the Salmon River for many miles and hours. We drove two hours out of our way from Bozeman, Montana, one morning in order to start our Yellowstone trip from its northeast entrance. After that eastern swing landed us in Red Lodge, we hooked back west to drive the entire length of the Beartooth Highway (US Route 12) from there to Cooke City/Silver Gate and into the national park.
In Summary: The trip brought home our desire to live at least part of the year amid mountains, streams, woods, and open skies. We have taken a baby step in that direction with a small apartment in Colorado, and only time will tell if that is enough … or too much? … with our kids spread from coast to coast, and ongoing jobs and life changes for family members in all four of our time zones. Meanwhile, we have the memories of this brilliant road trip, which I would have been happy to continue for at least a few more weeks. Responsibilities lured us back to our humid home, but we’ve already agreed a western journey will be a permanent fixture on our summer docket.
One Foot Out the Door 