Recalibration complete

8/15-8/17

Ah, yes. Once again, I’ve reached that part of my road trip where I have to try to make the two-day trek back to Austin through the wastelands of West Texas interesting. This is my least favorite part of writing this blog, though it does provide a good opportunity for some quality introspection.

It seems that every year, I end up having to rush home from some amazing faraway destination, driving long grueling hours to get back home miraculously just in time for some event. Last year, I hauled my buns home from California in a couple of days flat so that I could catch a flight out of Austin to go to Raleigh for the Hot Rod Power Tour. In 2017, I sprinted from Southern California to Roswell, NM, so that I could view the solar eclipse, then sprinted the rest of the way home in one day flat. In 2016, I got caught up in extreme monsoons that threatened to swamp me if I didn’t get home quick. In short, I have never experienced a nice, leisurely, relaxing drive back to Austin.

So this year, I planned a few days to kind of hop from destination to destination, just hanging out and slowly making my way back to civilization.

Of course, this year, I also found “the” house in Austin, while in Reno, and then bid on and subsequently won the bid on it while at the Grand Canyon. So my planned leisurely trip back to Austin turned, once again, into a mad dash – this time to get back into town in time to view my new house before finalizing the deal on it.

Fortunately, a little flat-out running never bothered Jane, and this year she’s running even better than ever thanks to the new fuel system and a freshly-tuned motor. So on the morning of the 15^th, I packed her up and departed Kanab, AZ with my sights on Albuquerque, a short 500-mile hop away. This drive is so familiar to me by now that it almost feels like an old friend. My favorite landmark is this mesa on AZ-98 just outside of Page. I have dozens of photos of this mesa stretching back to my first road trip in 2014 – I don’t think I’ve missed a year of photographing it yet!

Jane and I settled into our familiar rhythm as the scenery whipped by, our ribbon of black asphalt stretching endlessly into the horizon. Fields dotted with cattle and horses turned into blurs of green and yellow, speckled with dark spots. Mesas and buttes were a little more long-lived – as rocks always are – rising from the landscape, patterned in the unmistakable red-and-white candy cane stripes of this part of the American Southwest. The day was clear and blue and the weather was fine, and Jane howled along relentlessly, eight hard-working cylinders adding their voices to the wind. And once again I was reminded of how lucky I am. Of all the things I've done in my life, road tripping this car has been one of the best.

I reached Albuquerque without incident, had some green chile enchiladas, then got up the next morning and drove some more. 

A really silly sign

The landscape dulled and flattened, brilliant reds and rich yellows and vibrant greens and deep blues giving way to a more muted color palette.

And still I drove. Eventually, I hit a band of the typical mid-August West Texas storms, fortunately skirting the worst of it.

And still I drove. The sun neared the horizon, and I was fortunate enough to be treated to one of the spectacular West Texas sunsets, finally splashing some color back into my life for what felt like the first time in days, though it had only been that morning that I left Albuquerque.

And still I drove, as the sun slipped below the horizon and night spread across Texas. Just me and the roar of a muscle car, somehow quiet, almost lost in the endless velvet black of uninhabited desert. The twinkle of lights far in the distance - maybe some small town, maybe Austin seen from a hundred miles away - called me onwards out of the blackness, away from solitude.

As strange as it is, this part of the trip – the kind of crappy long run home – is essential to my yearly “recalibration”. Let me explain. Every year, I head out on the road for a few weeks to have a grand adventure, and it has never failed to be full of new sights and experiences and people. Those few weeks help me remind myself that there is always more out there. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with day-to-day life, of course. Being on a neverending adventure would be ultimately exhausting, lonely, and fairly impossible, given that I’m not made of money. But I find that without a little adventure, it’s far too easy to fall into a rhythm of life that pushes you into a rut. When that happens to me, suddenly time seems to accelerate and weeks can pass with me doing nothing but existing. That works for some people, but it doesn’t work for me. I like to keep the hunger for more – more experiences, more adventures, more knowledge, more life – keen and sharp. And these road trips are like a whetstone. At first, it is hard to get out the door, and hard to push on to new places and new experiences. And then it gets easier and easier until it seems unfathomable to not do something interesting with my day. When I’m on the road, I’m the best version of me that I can be. At least, I’m the version of me that I like best.

The problem is that when I get home from these trips, the return to normal life can chafe pretty badly. It’s jarring, going from a life of complete freedom to a life with schedules and deadlines. Even though I am lucky enough to have an amazing job and almost no other life responsibilities, I still feel it. But I find that the long drive home through West Texas is just enough of a chore that it helps anchor me back down into a happy middle ground. So even though I’ll always complain about this drive, I’ll always appreciate it as a way to get my feet back on the ground so I can live like a functional member of society again when I get home.

 And so I drove - slowly letting go of life on the road, slowly shifting back into my daily life, slowly returning to normalcy - until I reached home. As always, the soft thump of the closing garage door had a kind of bittersweet echo of finality to it. Another year, another road trip in the books, closed out and finished. It would be sad, if I didn't have so many other things to look forward to in my everyday life. After all, in the next couple of weeks I'll be moving into a new house, with all kinds of interesting things to sort out and an entirely new neighborhood to explore. I've got field trips and conferences and new projects to tackle at work, and I've got a big backlog of new recipes I'd like to try in the kitchen. It's all normal life stuff, but it's so much easier to do when I come back refreshed from a road trip.

So, with that.... my recalibration is complete. Kelly signing out.

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Footnote: Thank you all for your patience as I finished up these blog posts! The past couple of months have been insanely busy, but Jane and I are finally settled into our new house. I hope you all enjoyed reading about the trip as much as I enjoyed writing about it. I'll see you all next year!