Day Twenty-nine: July 8
It occurs to me that I should have arranged this trip to end one day sooner: day 28, exactly four weeks, has a nice round feel to it.
But on my last day, I did manage to complete the circle in another way. On my way out of Amarillo, I stopped again at the cemetery where Charles Goodnight is buried.
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In the month since I was last here and found no bandanas tied to the fence, people have been by to carry on the tradition. |
| So I added the bandana I had meant to place here last time. (Mine is the black one.) |  |
I’m actually glad I didn’t place the bandana on the outbound journey: doing it now supplied a nice punctuation mark to my trip, bringing everything full circle as I head for home.
Today’s final journal entry is about completion: filling up the corners of the story of my trip with some final details that didn’t make it anywhere else.
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Of course I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without my faithful TARDIS, which loyally pressed ahead up mountains and down, on dirt roads and paved, and along the way logged far better gas mileage than it ever gets in the city. |
Then there are my cameras. On the left is my Main Scenic Camera, a Nikon D750 with a wide-angle lens recommended by a photographer with a National Parks blog for capturing landscapes. The camera lets you see everything about the exposure the way you like it, and saves pictures in “RAW” format for better adjusting in Photoshop later. The wide angle lens means you get everything in the photo that you’d otherwise have to do one of those iPhone panorama shots to get. The downside is that it the wide angle distorts perspective compared to the human eye, and can make things look small that were actually huge. I have a “standard” lens for the D750 but after swapping lenses back and forth a few time early in the trip, I just started using the next camera when I wanted a closer shot.
The next camera is a Nikon Coolpix, a point-and-shoot camera that takes quite nice pictures but picks all the exposure settings automatically whether you want it to or not. However, its big advantage is that it slips into a pocket, and is waterproof so no problem if it gets rained on. So it’s my hiking camera, as well as for shots where the wide angle isn’t what I want. It’s shown standing on a little tripod that I call my “selfie stick” even though it isn’t. Whenever you’ve seen a picture of me in these entries (with one or two exceptions), that photo was taken by the Coolpix on its little tripod, using the 10-second timer.
Finally, on the right, the GoPro. Briefly used with a dashboard mount when I was driving, but mainly used to shoot video of hot springs in Yellowstone, which didn’t make it into the journals.
(The picture of the cameras was shot with my iPhone, which I didn’t otherwise use for photos this trip.)
It was the D750 and its wide angle lens that took that moon picture the night I tried for star photography:
On my 2015 trip, I noticed that the National Parks seemed to be very popular international destinations, with far more visitors speaking other languages than English (and even with English, American accents outnumbered by British and Australian). That’s something I expected to be different this time, given the current epidemic, but to my surprise it wasn’t. The proportion of people speaking US-accented English was perhaps higher than in 2015, but I heard Spanish (not necessarily intercontinental, of course), German, French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian (or other Eastern European), and a lot of other languages I couldn’t recognize.
I’m delighted if America’s National Parks are a worldwide draw, but surprised by the timing. Were this many people really traveling internationally, despite the epidemic? But perhaps there’s an alternate explanation: at Canyonlands, on French-speaking family noticed my Texas license plate and told me (in English) that they were from Houston. Perhaps it’s not international travelers, but first-generation immigrants who love to see the natural wonders of their adopted country. I can certainly see that.
I saw license plates from all over the country, and from conversations I had and others that I overheard (you don’t say “eavesdropped on” when you’re a writer, people-watching is legitimate research) I gathered a whole lot of people were on long driving trips like mine, most planned much more short-term than I did, and for a common reason: anything else the kids would have done this summer has been cancelled.
If a lot of kids get to see something amazing instead of just their local soccer field this summer, then perhaps something good has come of the disaster of the epidemic. (Don’t get upset, I’m not saying it would be “worth it,” just that something good has happened.)
Certainly one young budding geologist may have gained from his experiences: at Arches National Park, next to the Balanced Rock, I heard one kid no more than maybe four years old say, “Daddy look! No, not up, look down! This rock looks like mud but it’s rock! That’s so cool!” He stamped on it a few times and added, “Wow, that’s strong rock.”
On the other hand, I overheard another kid about the same age at Bryce Canyon. Evidently fed up with the whole experience, he loudly proclaimed, “Red rocks are STUPID!”
Then there was an up-and-coming conspiracy theorist, around ten years old, who looked at an outcropping of “slickrock” at an overlook in Mesa Verde and declared, “Hey, this rock is fake! Real rock isn’t like this!” He kept trying to prove his point for some time.
Also in the category of things overheard, I passed one group of hikers, college-age or so, which included a girl wearing a bikini top. One of the group mentioned the forecast for the next day was a high over a hundred, and she said, “Well you know I do my best to get naked on these hikes.”
That was less ominous than another college group who, as they passed me, were saying “…but larceny is only a year so that’s…” I didn’t hear the rest.
So, those are some bits and pieces from the trip. I don’t know if I’ll try a trip this ambitious again: I had some definite travel fatigue the last week or so. But I’m glad to have done it, and glad to be finally home again.
Trip Report:
Miles driven today: 352.4
Total miles (final): 5864.9
