Yellowstone is weird, we all know that. It's like the surface of the moon with mud and steam and water bubbling up and around everywhere. You should see it, but it's nothing I find overly interesting. It seems unreal, I can't relate to it like a trail or a mountain or a forest. There's no context for me. Plus it's pretty heavy on the tourists. By now, it's mostly retired couples, all the families are gone with their kids back in school, but it's still packed. There are restaurants and lodges where you can eat your ice cream or drink your beer while watching Old Faithful go off, taking a casual interest in one of Nature's weirder phenomena, like watching a TV show in the background. At least that's the attitude most old couples in their home-away-from-home luxury 45-foot-long "wreck-reational" vehicles project... The National Parks are strange that way; they've been set aside as places we should protect for their own sake. There's no question they are places of
beauty that merit a visit, but to lots of people they seem to be like a checklist: how many parks can I visit in my 2 week vacation, rushing along from one to the next like there's nothing in between? Can I collect all 58?
I guess I just want to make sure I'm enjoying the places I go for my own sake, not just to check off points on a map. The National Parks are great, but I hardly ever see any retired couples drive their super-RVs to equally amazing places like the woods of southwestern Oregon. "Well, Ethel, there's not a park there, so it's probably not worth seeing..."
I think it's a problem with the way most people look at their time. The tourist industry markets certain "destinations" as places you should spend your vacation. There are expensive rental RVs everywhere I've seen that encourage you to "see America" by renting this giant gashog to cart your kids around major tourist destinations in the US so you can reinforce your preconceptions about America while never leaving the comforts of home. When you do that, tho, you use money to shield you from real experience. You're taking the same exact trip everyone who has rented that RV before you has... Where's the fun in that? If you stop at Subway or Mickey D's for a sandwich every day at lunch you're never going to discover that awesome little taco shop next to the laundromat in Carpinteria.
If you stay in a hotel every night, you're not going to have that awkward-at-first-but-later-really-interesting conversation over dinner with that 50 year old hitchhiker you met in Montana, or the old friends who scattered across the country and you almost forgot about. You never find out about the underwater cave in the swimming hole by the side of the road near Missoula, MT. Not using money to travel requires you to depend on people (and actually meet real Americans!), and sometimes it takes a lot of energy, but it's always worth it. You can literally drive all over the country and never see any of it if you stay on interstates, eat fast food, and sleep in Holiday Inns the whole way... Plenty of people do that, and it's also the easiest way to travel because you don't have to open your mind to really anything at all. Luckily for me, I don't have enough money for a big RV or hotels. So enough on my rant about upper-middle-class-pseudo-travellers, here's some on my trip to the Grand Tetons (hey, that's a National Park!)Grand Tetons means "large breasts" in French. They are made of rock, 7,000 feet tall, and there are 3 of them. Don't ask me... Anyway they are amazing mountains because there are no foothills; just 6,000ft to 13,000ft immediately, and right above Jackson Lake.
We got there, and immediately got a permit to go backcountry up to Holly Lake and around Lake Solitude the next day. Once you walked 10 minutes from the road up the trail, the retired RV couples mysteriously disappeared... This was one of the most spectacular hikes I've been on this summer, and the fall colors were just coming out too. I hiked alone with my thoughts, Robert was in front or behind. It was a hike to Lake Solitude after all. That night I slept in my hammock just below 10,000ft, waking up occasionally and checking the time by seeing where the stars had moved to over my head. The hike back down the next day was even better, going over a pass near 11,000ft and back down thru a big U-shaped glacially carved valley.
Wyoming, as I learned from the girls at CarQuest, while changing the van's oil yet again (comes up fast...), is like a hell you can't escape from if you grew up there. That seems about right, except for a small strip on the western edge that makes it into the Rockies. It's a lot like Nebraska, brown, flat, smelly, only somehow, there are even less people in it. I was intrigued at all these endless dirt roads that just seemed to go off in a random direction forever. I never did drive one tho, as we were already close enough to the middle of nowhere. Finally I saw a tree near Colorado. We made it to Ft. Collins. Here I went for a run in the rain followed by some free beer at New Belgium.
22,465mi
143 days
"Being a vagabond means you've already dropped out... You've decided to live your own life story, not the version some dildo businessmen want to lay on you for the sake of their bank-accounts. Sure you'll make your own mistakes, but you'll make your own triumphs too. At least you'll get to feel real." - Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in America, 1973
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