“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
—Bilbo Baggins
July 25
Well, I’m back.
As expected, the last driving day of my trip offered no particular sights of interest. I started off through flat New Mexico desert, into flat Texas desert, my route skirted the northern edge of the Texas hill country and showed me some rolling, mesquite-covered hills, then became flat grassland until it became city, and then I was home.
For my final Road Trip Journal entry, I thought I’d have a look back at the trip overall, and notice a few things that didn’t make it into previous blog posts. Until now, I’ve focused these posts entirely on the National Parks I visited. But let me now say a few words about my faithful traveling companions.
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My faithful TARDIS performed loyally on a journey of 3036 miles, excluding all the driving I did inside the various parks. She suffered a scraped bumper and getting a whole lot of mud in the driver’s seat, but never faltered. |
| I wouldn’t be much of an Alton Brown fan if I didn’t plan culinary self-sufficiency on the trip. In the event, I only used the little 12v oven once. It made a lovely beef stew for me on one driving day, but it was just too much trouble putting all the ingredients together without an actual kitchen to work in. The cooler, though, carried my well-equipped picnic pantry with me across country. I went out to restaurants for dinner, but lunches were always homemade, with a veritable sandwich shop riding along in the back seat. |  |
 My camera takes a selfie |
And of course these blog posts would have been far less interesting without my trusty camera. The little tripod it’s sitting on has bendable rubber legs that can be wrapped around guard rails or tree branches, or molded to sit atop the most irregular rocks. I called the tripod my “selfie stick” but really it was far better than those yard-long poles people wave around. With the little tripod and a 10-second delay timer, I could put myself in the picture much better than actual selfie sticks ever manage. It also came in handy for holding the camera steady for multi-second exposures down in Carlsbad Caverns. |
| Let’s see an actual selfie stick do this! |  |
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The trip began with the Writers Retreat in Taos, a wonderful time both to get a lot of work done on my current work-in-progress, and connect with other writers doing the same thing. There’s a shared energy that comes from the group, even if everyone was working on their own and just trading smalltalk at meals. |
Moving on from the retreat, it went to Estes Park and the Rocky Mountains. I didn’t say much about the town at the time. I don’t know how Estes Park looks like “off stage” as it were, but it presents to visitors a pleasant little main street of shops and restaurants (and, for some reason, a very large number of ice cream parlors and saltwater taffy stores), as well as a river walk one block over.
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I tried Rocky Mountain trout for dinner at three different restaurants the nights I was there, prepared three different ways, all delicious.
I mentioned on my driving days the startling lack of scenic pullouts along highways outside the National Parks; if things were different I’d have loved to take photos of many places along those drives. There was one exception. Right after crossing the state line into Utah, there was an exit like those that normally lead to rest stops, but marked “Scenic View.” I took the turn, and Utah presented this first glimpse:
In Moab, at Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, I noticed that I’d evidently come across an international vacation destination: both in town and in the parks, I heard families and groups speaking French, German, Chinese and Japanese— far more, in fact, than I heard anyone speaking English. American tourists were far outnumbered along this part of the trip. This was different from Rocky Mountain National Park, where I don’t recall hearing anything but American accents. I don’t know what lures the world to Moab, but it’s a World Travelers destination.
I had bad luck with restaurants in Moab. The first night, I went to a burger/pub place that looked popular— it was crowded anyway— but had a terrible time. I sat there for 15 minutes without a glass of water or a menu, until finally I flagged down a waiter and asked for some attention. Then he brought me water in glass that hadn’t been cleaned and had ketchup smeared all over it. I should have just left at that point, but I stuck it out and had a thoroughly mediocre burger. The next night I asked at my hotel for a recommendation, and they sent me to a steak house perched high up a mountainside, overlooking the whole town. I could see by the menu this was a high-priced sort of place but after last night’s disaster I thought I’d go ahead and splurge. But the restaurant was infested with flies! Dozens of them swarming around the tables. The waiters were very apologetic and said they’d never had a problem like that before. I believed them— this clearly wasn’t some greasy spoon sort of place where that would be a sign of poor cleaning. Again I stuck it out, and the food was really top notch, but hard to enjoy when I had to keep waving flies away. Finally the third night I got lucky, at an Italian place called Pasta Joe’s that was wonderful all around.
On to the Grand Canyon, with views like the above and an overly crowded Grand Canyon village up on the rim. The International trend continued; here again, based on my anecdotal survey, World travelers outnumbered the Americans, though by less wide a margin than at Moab. It’s nice that our National Parks are attractions for the world, but come on Americans— these are your parks, right in your backyard, go see them more!
From the Grand Canyon my course turned toward home. Brief looks at Petrified Forest, Petroglyph National Monument, and Carlsbad Caverns lay along the way, but the direction was homeward now, back instead of on.
This morning, leaving Carlsbad, I had a pang of regret I hadn’t planned an extra day to go see Guadalupe Mountains National Park, just 45 miles away. My reasoning for leaving it out was faulty: I’ve been there before and seen what there is to see along the road, but Guadalupe is one of the least developed parks in the system, and its sights can only be reached by hiking— on trails that climb 2000 feet to the plateau atop the ancient reef. I’d previously thought I wasn’t up to such hikes, so I left Guadalupe Mountains alone.
But after prepping for my Bright Angel hike in the Grand Canyon, this time I was up to taking one of those hikes. I just didn’t think of it. Now, who knows when I’ll be that way again, or whether I’ll be equally able to make the climb to see what the Guadalupe Mountains have to offer?
But it was too late to change my plans. Ahead lay the final leg of my trip, and now that too is done. All that’s left to say is:
Well, I’m back.
