Learning to avoid "reality"

Wednesday 4/22/2015

I got up bright and early this morning to pack up camp and head back into the desert. I took scenic highway 89 up from Sedona to Flagstaff so I could enjoy some of the beautiful red rocks and scenery that Sedona is so famous for. Unfortunately my camera appears to not be doing such a good job with reds in landscape mode right now (probably because I closed it in the decklid earlier by accident) but I’ve done my best with them here!

Heading into the town of Sedona.

Another classic car enthusiast out to enjoy the beautiful weather. Jane was much larger than his car

I swear these rocks are actually super red...

Now if that ain't a pretty sight I don't know what is.

From Flagstaff I hopped back on the interstate and Jane and I started running again. We pulled off in Holbrook, AZ to head to Petrified Forest National Park. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a famous relic of Route 66 – the Wigwam Motel! This place has been featured and referenced so many places that I thought it surely couldn’t still exist. But sure enough, there it was. I pulled Jane up to take a couple of pictures of the place.

All of the rooms are wigwams!! Awesome!

While I was there another lady was wandering around taking pictures of the motel – which featured a bunch of classic cars as decoration. She took a picture of Jane and then did a bit of a double take as I hopped in and cranked her up a few minutes later. Guess she thought that Jane was a decoration too! I felt a bit bad for the other classics at the hotel as they all had flat tires and appeared to be in their final resting places. It makes me proud to be able to drive a piece of American history every day and help keep it alive.

After my brief stop I headed on to the southern end of the park, which features thousands of petrified trees. People have told me how cool this place is, but I never really grasped the sheer amount of trees here until I got here! Petrified Forest kind of puts Florissant Fossil Beds to shame in terms of size and number of trees.

Little House on the Prairie, harr harr.

A lovely desert day.

A giant agatized petrified log!

Just thought this preserved knot on the tree was cool.

While I was hiking around one of the big petrified tree loops, I encountered a fellow who asked me if I knew anything about the fossilization of the giant logs. Well of course that is something I know about (as I work with fossil redwood trees at my job) so I was glad to talk to him for a while. It’s always a good day when I can teach someone something!

Heading north towards the Painted Desert.

Logs just laying around all willy nilly!

A giant log! Looks like it's been sectioned but that's just how it has fallen apart over the years.

Distant view of a giant log laying on the ground.

Closeup view along the length of the tree.

I really like how smooth and symmetrical this flower is. It is very pleasing.

Eventually I had exhausted the small hikes in the southern end of the park so I drove on up north towards the Painted Desert. That’s the one flaw of Petrified Forest in my opinion: the lack of good long hikes. Mostly there’s just a lot of short 1-mile hikes around locations close to the road but I tend to enjoy longer, more strenuous trails. Fortunately one trail, Blue Mesa, fit the bill for a good hike. It starts up on a crest and leads down into a very badlands-y area featuring the Blue Mesa Member of the Chinle Formation. Not a terribly long hike, but it does at least include some hills and some really spectacular scenery!

And now you know why this is called the Painted Desert! Looks almost fake, doesn't it?

The sedimentary geologist in me is so happy right now.

The further north I went, the more vibrant the surrounding landscape became. Gone were the flat endless scrubby plains, instead replaced by badlands and large outcrops of red and purple and yellow banded rocks. Much more my kind of landscape!

You know, I think I might just really like taking pictures of Jane with cool rocks.

One of my stops included Newspaper Rock, a famous boulder known for its overwhelming abundance of petroglyphs – seemingly an ancient “newspaper”! I was a little disappointed with this stop as the path stops at the top of a cliff while the rock itself is down at the bottom. You have to use provided binoculars to really get a good look at the petroglyphs, and it’s just not quite the same. But I understand why they formatted the stop that way: the steepness of the cliff renders the petroglyphs all but inaccessible to the curious tourist or graffiti artist that might otherwise consider defacing the rock. It’s sad that that’s a precaution that they have to take, but it would be even sadder to see this amazing art wiped out of existence by someone without two brain cells to rub together.

Right after crossing over the interstate in the park, I stopped at the point that commemorates Historic Route 66. Interestingly enough, Petrified Forest National Park is the only national park to have had a section of Route 66 going through it. The spot where the new road and the historic road intersect is marked with some Route 66 info and an old rusted out Studebaker. Unfortunately it’s behind a wall so you can’t park next to it, but I got Jane as close as I could.

Poor Studebaker.

Jane looks so vibrant in comparison to the old iron rusting out in the field.

The steering had a literal rag joint! Not sure if it started out looking like that but it sure looks cool now.

Oh, and here’s a shot of an Australian guy taking a picture of Jane with the Studebaker. I was terribly unsubtle (intentionally) when I took this picture so we had a good laugh and a conversation afterwards. Nice guy and I don’t blame him at all for beelining for Jane when looking for a photography opportunity (ha!).

Yep, not bad looking.

I spent a little more time wandering around the park making sure that I saw all of the major sights, then hopped back on the highway to head into New Mexico. I wanted to drive for as long as I could before stopping so that I would have less driving to do the next day. No more sights to see, just driving and driving some more. I had been summoned back to work for Friday so I had to pass quite a few interesting sights with just a wave and a promise on this trip. But that’s okay – I know I’ll be back out this way again sometime soon.

One last shot of Jane and the Painted Desert. A bit gratuitous, I know.

The Painted Desert without Jane is still lovely.

"We're New Mexico, and we have all of those delicious chiles that you want"

My last campground for this trip was not terribly scenic (being in Grants, New Mexico) but it did have the benefit of free cookies, pie, and good warm weather. It was a nice last night before the long drive back to reality.

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Thursday 4/23/2014

When morning rolled around, it was time for one last haul all the way back to Colorado. I was not relishing the prospect of a 7.5 hour drive home. Nothing but interstate driving. What a bummer!

Still pretty beautiful in some spots early on.

Anddddd back to flat.

I improved my mood by stopping off in Las Vegas, NM for lunch. Life seemed much brighter after a round of green chile chicken enchiladas (yes, again) and even better after I had bought myself a half gallon of green chile sauce to take back to Colorado. For whatever reason green chile sauce just stays contained in that state and hasn’t succeeded in escaping to other places yet. So I make a point of grabbing some any time that I’m in the state.

See that snowy cap on that mountain way in the distance? Yep, that's where I live (well, like 15 miles west of it).

Other than that, I really have nothing to report. We hopped off of the interstate for a while to run the Turquoise Trail near Santa Fe, but most of the time we were just driving as quickly as possible on whatever major highway led north. Jane ran me faithfully home and I got back to my house at 6:30 PM. After unloading all of my crap (which had, as always, somehow grown exponentially in the short amount of time that I was on the road), I went and laid on the floor and just enjoyed not sitting in a seat for a while. Don’t get me wrong, Jane’s seats are VERY comfortable and the ride is always awesome – but for someone like me who has a hard time sitting still, it gets tedious running long days multiple days in a row.

Laying there on my apartment floor, I took some time to appreciate just how good the trip was. For such a short run (time-wise) across the country, we managed to do a LOT of things. From big city nights and car shows to cruises and beach time to long desert hikes and camping, this trip had it all. I am well and truly exhausted and that is the marker of a good trip. Some may like to go places to sit and relax, but I am not really one of those people. The world is a vibrant place full of gems just waiting to be discovered, and I’ve got it in my head that I should do that all as quickly as possible.

But here’s what I’d like to know: why is it that whenever a vacation ends, people say that they have to get “back to reality”? Why can’t vacation be part of reality? Are you just not allowed to have a good time with lots of adventures when you’re in reality? Must we differentiate so much between work and play that we can’t even include playtime in our realities? Why is it that we define “reality” as a boring state of being in which you wait for your next planned vacation?

To quote an old sci-fi movie from way back when: “I reject your reality and substitute my own”. I refuse to accept that my reality must be boring. I refuse to accept that I can only have adventures a couple of times a year. And I refuse to accept that my life must have a baseline routine to which I must return. Instead I substitute my own reality, where life is varied and interesting and full of adventures. It is easy to fall into a rut and grind along like a wheel on a work cart. But I am not a wheel on a work cart. I am a person and I see opportunities spread out in front of me like so many colors in a rainbow.

So yeah, I’ll return to my job tomorrow. And I won’t be sad about it, because even my job can hold adventures. And if it doesn’t, there’s always the weekend – places to go, people to see, things to do. I won’t spend all my time moping around waiting for the next big trip. Because all of this is my reality: my job, my weekends, my road trips and vacations and clubs and events and people and places. I owe it to myself to be interested in every aspect of my life, not just the brightest and shiniest bits of it.

On that note, Kelly signing out. Expect to see more posts in the future as the year progresses. I’ve got a lot of living to do.