VEGAS, BABY! 5 Reasons It’s Time to Hit the Road

The road is waiting! So is Padre, and I better finish this before he gets cranky.

After the Epic Journey last spring we picked up right where we left off: yard work and ‘real’ work, pumpkin growing, jam-making, Mariners, and mindless TV shows such as Beach Front Bargain Hunt. Too much news, too, even for a journalism junkie like me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love home, much as the nail technician who painted my toes gold yesterday loves her home. She hummed a soft tune near the end of my treatment, similar to music I’d heard in Southeast Asia, so I asked where she learned it. She smiled widely and eagerly told me all about Ho Chi Minh City, which we had visited, her home on the other side of the world. I received a double hand massage, I suspect, just so she could keep chatting with me about it. Yay.

Yet how daunting to live away from home for years, most likely not by choice but by circumstance. I felt guilty and lucky all at once, since I traipse across the oceans so easily and go home when I want to go home. Cue the cognitive dissonance, for the world’s affluent fortunate ones. Lucky old geezers like us must always be thankful for our good fortune. Yet still, the more I travel, the more I want to go, just go, and then go again. See it all! Now, please!

I think this is because underneath it all, we know that luck never lasts, so if not now, when? If we haven’t seen it, we want to see it before age and circumstance visit us, as they inevitably will. (Kids: Make sure the Travel Channel plays all day in the nursing home. Just sayin’.)

And guess where I’ve NEVER been, since everyone else surely has? Believe it or not, I’ve never, ever been to Vegas, except the airport, where I stuffed some coins in a machine once so I could pretend I’d been there (not).

Recently we conducted an inventory of cool close-by places that we’d never seen:

Las Vegas (Padre’s been there, but not as a tourist)

Death Valley (pictured in the quote photo at top)

Yosemite Park

Lake Tahoe

This list turned into a road trip in a blink, and now we’ve packed the car, downloaded the podcasts, and the open road awaits. Hopefully it will be open, once we get past snarls of Seattle traffic and over Snoqualmie Pass. And hopefully the summer wildfire smoke has cleared enough to reveal the wide open plains. If not, that’s ok. At least we’ll be going.

We like to travel for the same reasons we owned a sailboat for 20 years, even though we often ended up in precarious situations. Like the time we stopped a Washington State ferry in its tracks when our little sailboat blocked its path, all by itself. And we watched helplessly from the window of a Friday Harbor restaurant.

Or the time Padre lashed himself to the wheel while I cowered below as we fought our way through a violent storm.

Or the time our engine caught fire as we attempted to dock in downtown Seattle, just as the Navy Fleet arrived for Seafair right behind us. Really. (More on those adventures in Reason #4, below).

When we told others such tales they’d ask why we kept sailing, and we’d both say, “Because it’s FUN!” Now of course that doesn’t make much sense, although it did to Albert Camus, who noted that “What gives value to travel is fear.” Albert gets us.

So besides fun, what else draws us away from home once again?

5 REASONS IT’S TIME TO HIT THE ROAD

REASON #1 Disrupt the Routines.For over 35 years, I knew the routine of September. I sat in a darkened auditorium during the “Welcome Back Teachers” speeches, wondering what it might be like to be somewhere else that time of year. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my profession. But I knew the routine, just like I know the routines at home.

How exhilarating to be on the road, in September, rather than going back to school! For 30-some years, Labor Day really was labor day for me, as I frantically prepped for the first day of school long into the night. Now we plan a trip the first week in September. And that’s fun.

And how fun to try exotic foods, walk the walls of ancient cities, explore museums, discover a cool new hotel. A small thrill for me: When we arrive at our latest lodging (always a place I carefully choose after obsessive research) I’m eager to see if my online choice lives up to the hype. (It’s all about the shopping, Padre wryly observes). And the new people we meet, who haven’t heard all our stories a hundred times? We haven’t heard their stories either, so it’s a quid pro quo. And we’ve met so many fascinating new people, on the road.

REASON # 2 Life gets simplified on a journey. We provisioned our small sailboat with care, since everything had to fit in the limited nooks and crannies below deck. The same principle applies on a cruise or land trip, and of course I take it as a point of personal pride to thwart the airlines’ extortionist luggage policies, which means always taking less.

Once we have everything whittled down to the necessities, we have way less to carry, keep track of, or clean. Home, on the other hand, is not simplified. There’s always a file cabinet to organize, a closet to clean out, a flowerbed that needs attention, stuff we’re hanging on to just in case. Oh, and the corner filled with our dear departed relatives’ possessions? We’ve got to do something about that one of these days.

On the road, all that melts away.

REASON #3 Learn More.I love this one cheezy cop show where the lead detective always tells his team, “Go. Learn things.”  Yes sir! May I have a travel budget to go with that order, Sir?

Padre and I are that team. We both read the New York Times cover-to-cover every day, which takes stamina. We also read several other newspapers and magazines online. So yes, we’re weird. But let us be, because we’re having fun. We just love to learn everything.

So of course we love museums. Do you have any idea how many cool museums there are, tucked away in cities around the world? When you think of Vegas you don’t usually think museums (I think showgirls, high rollers, the movie The Hangover, and a baby). Vegas, though, is filled with museums – this trip we’re checking out the Mob Museum, the Atomic Testing Museum, the Bellagio Art Museum, the Titanic Exhibit, to name just a few.

My family took boat trips up the British Columbia coastline every summer, and I remember how thrilled I’d be when I woke up, looked out the porthole, and voila – a new place I’d never been! A whole new town to get to know! New boat kids to play with! New streets to wander! It’s pretty much the same thing now, and I love learning all about a new city just as much today as I did when I was eight.

I suspect there are scads of other fanatic learners like us out there, and my evidence? The exploding popularity of podcasts. Road trips are made for podcasts, and today if you’re interested in a subject, someone’s made a podcast about it. We started the first season of the trending podcast Slowburn, so by the time we reach Death Valley we’ll have learned how Watergate turned out. (Or maybe we’ll find those 18 ½ minutes at the Mob Museum. I mean where’d they go?).

REASON #4 Challenges are FUN.To this day I kick myself for not accompanying Padre when he supervised our teenaged charges on a Bastille Day Metro tour of Paris. Too hard and I was too tired, so I stayed back at the hotel. In the joyful chaos, Padre relates, Parisians threw firecrackers everywhere, even underground, as our kids joined in the celebration – what a memory.

I slept through it all, and I still haven’t mastered the underground Paris Metro. And I could have done it with French flags and firecrackers – what was I thinking? I think these old wise words are so true: We usually don’t regret things we’ve done in life, as much as what we DIDN’T do. So I’m going to say YES as often as possible, while there’s still time. (Within reason, of course. I’m still not scuba diving. Everyone’s entitled to their own personal ‘no’s’ I say).

Sometimes in order to have travel fun, we have to live near the edge and not fall off – I get that part. When our sailboat stopped the ferry, for example, we could have gone over the edge – we could have had a crashed boat and a horrendous insurance problem. The helpful nature of other people came to our rescue, as it so often does when we’re in trouble on a trip.

Turns out we had unwittingly set our anchor to a pile of garbage* (*a metaphor for life I must write about someday, by the way). As the tide rose, the pile began to move, our sailboat traipsing along in its tow. Fortunately for us, a rescue boat operator snagged Padre (the boat, not the husband) to save the day.

So we tried, and failed, to anchor properly. The world didn’t end, and for the rest of our lives we have a crazy travel story to share. So what’s not to like about that? If we’d stayed home on the sofa, well, that’s where we’d still be, watching Beachfront Bargain Hunt, I suppose, instead of seeing the world for ourselves.

REASON #5 To rediscover what’s really important in life. There’s something about a road trip that encourages conversation. We finally have time to reflect on life as the scenery rolls by outside, sparking memories. After long stretches of silence, one or the other of us will broach a topic – something about the kids, about relatives and friends, about purpose – things that really matter. This happens at home, too, but a road trip clears away all the available distractions.

On our Vegas trip we plan to visit close friends and family too; what’s more important in life than our connections to these folks? We make some of the best memories on trips to weddings, reunions, memorials, and other significant life events.

I’ll never forget the road trip I took to my brother’s 1972 wedding, for instance. Along with my travelling companions (two of my brother’s older guy friends), I endured a marathon road trip from Seattle to LA and back, in a 1960 three-on-the-tree Valiant Plymouth that kept breaking down. Oh the conversations the college-age kids had on that trip – and the adventures.  We chatted for hours about our hopes and dreams for life, love, the future, and how to keep that old car running. It was a trip for the ages (and the wedding was pretty cool, too).

So off we go. Stay tuned if you want to know How Old People Do Las Vegas (museums, check), or want to see some Death Valley and Yosemite scenery (there will be pictures), or want to find out whether or not we solved all the world’s problems, or how Watergate ends. All that and more, here at Blake Island Journeys – many more trips coming up on the calendar in the next year as well.

Who Hoo!

__________________

There’s roads, and there’s roads,
And they call. Can’t you hear it?
Roads of the earth
And roads of the spirit

The best roads of all
Are the ones that aren’t certain.
One of those is where you’ll find me
‘Til they drop the big curtain.
— Bruce Cockburn