The Long Road Home
Helen, Georgia
Sunday, 8-26-2018
“What every one of us looks for, but damn few of us gets to see... is just what's over the far horizon.
The trick is ... to know it when you see it, and an even bigger trick ... is to know what to do about it when you find it.” – From “Last of the Dogmen”
Leaving Oklahoma City for a long day of driving east back toward home was a bitter-sweet time. This trip is almost over but other adventures lie ahead. The trek has been almost five months on the road with many stops and unexpected finds along the way. The lure of traveling and what’s around the next curve in the road is enticing for me. To meet those interesting people who, without knowing it, enrich your life by sharing their stories with you.
It is hard to define all the things seen and places visited during this adventure across North America. There were family and friends visited along the way, while missing others due to timing or things they had going on when traveling through the area. It has been a journey of discovery in so many ways and realizations about things that may have only been a brief thought or action. It gives a renewed sense of living and what life has to bring if one opens themselves to possibilities, and does not march to the drummer the majority hears. Finding one’s own path along Life’s Highways and the choices we make every day sets us on the different courses in life. Some roads are less traveled, while others are the mainstays or conventional paths in life. Both are equally important but getting out of comfort zones or the norms can open up whole new worlds to your existence on this planet Earth.
The distance around the Earth at the Equator, its circumference, is 24,901 miles. This journey ends just over 23,500 miles of pure amazement and wonder, filled with many beautiful places visited and bucket list items checked off of our list. Missing a complete (equal to) circle of the globe by 1401 miles may seem like a big letdown, but to be honest, I did not realize this fact until the last day of the trip so didn’t plan for it to work out so closely anyway. The trip took paths through 28 states, 3 Canadian Territories, and numerous National Parks, Monuments, and Wildlife Refuge areas along the way.
People ask, “What is your favorite thing seen on the trip.” And you can only respond with, “There are so many favorites, you would have to create categories since things are so varied along the way.” Most beautiful can take on several meanings with, “The Lower Antelope Canyon” in Page, Arizona with its visual sensory overload of colors and hues, reveals that a photo cannot do it justice and must be seen with your own eyes to be totally appreciated.
Lower Antelope Canyon colors
The beauty of a Key West sunset with new made friends, watching the colors change as the sun slowly sinks below the horizon with a sailboat canvas-like background.
Key West Sunset
It is another must be seen to fully grasp the colors, sounds, and smells of the sea in that setting. A grizzly bear foraging for food in Alaska’s Denali National Park with the grand scenic vistas in all directions give one an understanding of how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things in this universe.
The person playing for free under the Washington Monument or other street musicians playing in so many places across America that catch you by surprise that you are compelled to stop for a bit and listen to sometimes familiar music or the personal inspiration from that particular player with his or her instrument. Those are what make a journey like this so rewarding. The never knowing what to expect along this highway or that byway can be what dreams are made of.
Those “Oh Wow” moments, like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first or fifteenth time giving you the same goose bumps every time.
Grand Canyon – Afternoon Vista
Seeing a large shooting star race across the sky and realizing how amazing it is to be in a time and place to witness this truly incredible sight. To see a man made architectural wonder, Fallingwater, the house Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built over a waterfall in rural Pennsylvania gives you such pleasure as you see the “Big Reveal” of the house at your first view, to the way the rooms inside are revealed as you enter them. We could all learn something about revealing things in our lives as sometimes we just throw all of ourselves out there on public media with no thought as to what might be saved and shared privately.
Then there was this special experience, the two and a half hour tour in Monument Valley that turned into almost five hours. There were supposed to be about ten to fifteen people on the tour. As it turned out, we were the only two on this trip. Our Navajo native tour guide was excited to tell of his heritage and show us these seldom seen places on the normal tour. He took us to places where we could see century’s old pottery lying on the ground.
Centuries old Pottery lying on the ground
There were many places where he took and showed us petroglyphs and picture glyphs on stone walls that were incredible to see firsthand. We saw the John Ford and John Wayne areas filmed in Monument Valley but these other places really highlighted the Navajo culture and its history.
There were the whimsical places on the trip, like where Forest Gump ended his three year run in Monument Valley.
Forest Gump Sign
It was interesting to see about thirty other people at that place on the highway taking photos and talking to one another. The musical highway in New Mexico that played “America the Beautiful” while driving over the rumble strips at 45 miles an hour. In Texas, near Amarillo, is Cadillac Ranch where the installation of ten half-buried Cadillac’s (1949-1963) nose-first in the ground is a free drive-by art exhibit.
Cadillac Ranch Cars half buried in a Texas corn field
Installed in 1974, the cars were either older running, used or junk cars, together spanning the successive generations of the car line — and the defining evolution of their tail fins.
A trip of this magnitude does not come, hassle free. There were the couple of mornings the toilet was plugged and had to be dealt with before morning coffee, which thankfully was only twice. A working toilet is important but so is coffee first thing. Or, the multiple repairs in several different states for a torn roof, which is horribly noisy traveling at sixty miles an hour as it is flapping in the wind. I fell off the roof in windy Winslow, AZ after one such repair and skinned up my legs pretty good which slowed me down for a couple weeks. Traveling almost three months in forest fire smoke tears up your lungs, resulting in sinus infections and a nagging cough, for months now, as the whole western US and Canada had multiple fires raging all summer long. The only real issue on the almost around the world mileage trip was replacing two front tires in Butte, Montana on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, due to the steel belt showing through on one of the tires.
This type of adventure shows you how big the United States and Canada really are. Seeing horizon after horizon after horizon and all sorts of topography from the flat lands of Florida and the plains of Nebraska, to the mountains of Colorado and British Columbia, each with its own special appeal and grandeur drives that home. I think every teacher, especially history and geography, should take a three week trip across the country to really see how big it is, and get a sense of scale of this great country and the people in it. It would make them better teachers being able to adequately describe the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” or the Lewis and Clark Expedition”. To see where these predecessors of our existence lived and traveled in another time brings with it a greater appreciation of where we as a nation are now and how the American way of life has somehow gotten broken over the years. It can be fixed by people who care, people who realize what is going on now is not what the signers of the Declaration of Independence were thinking at the time.
I will list a few of the things that stand out on the trek in no particular order which made a lasting impression. This list is more about the places and not the people seen or encountered along the way.
Florida - Key West – Sunset
Arizona – Page – Lower Antelope Canyon - Face in the Wind
Washington, DC – Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
Pennsylvania – Fallingwater – Frank Lloyd Wright house build over a waterfall
New Mexico – Angel Fire – Viet Nam Veterans Memorial
Arizona – The Grand Canyon
Oklahoma City – Bombing Memorial
Washington – Seattle – Dale Chihuly Exhibit – Gardens and Glass
California – Anza Borrego – 130 Sculptures in the Desert
Pennsylvania – Gettysburg Battlefields
Washington, DC – Arlington National Cemetery
California – McWay Falls (on Pacific Coast Highway)
Alaska – Denali Mountain at midnight
Arizona – Monument Valley
Washington – Mount Saint Helens
Oklahoma - Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge - Buffalo under full moon
New Mexico – Tent Rocks National Monument
Washington, DC – The Wall – Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Florida – Key West – Southernmost Point in United States
Alaska – Arctic Circle Way point on Haul Road to Prudhoe Bay
Oklahoma City Museum – Dale Chihuly Exhibit – Light and Magic
Wyoming – Yellowstone National Park - Beehive Geyser
Utah – Moab – Arches NP and Dead Horse Point SP
Wyoming – Devils Tower
Colorado – Mesa Verde National Park
Alaska – Glacier calving
As you can see there are many beautiful, inspiring places in the United States to see and fully experience the rich history of our past, the people, and the amazing things to do and explore. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as it were, with more wondrous things, too many to put into this blog post, for you to experience.
Get out there, get out of your comfort zone and see some of the incredible beauty out there waiting for you. It can be small trips for those with limited time and budget or treks like this one to check off that bucket list of things you wish to experience firsthand. The main thing is to do it, we are all getting older and time does not wait for anyone! In the Zac Brown song, “And as time goes by, It's funny how time can make you realize, We're running out of it.”
It has taken me a little longer than I planned to finish these posts about the trip due to unforeseen health issues at the end of the trip and afterwards.
Nice View from Pacific Coast Highway, California
I hope you have enjoyed this journey and will continue to watch for other posts as the adventures continue, Traveling Life’s Highways!