Was It All Just A Dream?

Living In The Moment

The thing I’ve struggled with the most during this trip, especially on the path home, was the thought that I wasn’t truly appreciating the experience and living in the moment. Be it hiking the trail out to the Badwater salt flats in Death Valley or seeing the stars in Joshua Tree or even just driving through a beautiful area in-between destinations. The problem is, by default, I think most of us have a tendency to concern ourselves with documenting our experiences, so that we can either remember them better ourselves and/or share them with others in the future, rather than just letting ourselves simply enjoy the experience. This is a paradox because the behavior inherently takes us away from the experience itself, sometimes completely.

This was made worse for me during my trip because of this blog. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed writing it and, for me, having a project to work on is what makes my wheels turn, but I couldn’t help feeling like along the way, when I should’ve just BEEN… I was thinking: Shoot another picture… Take a tracking video along this trail… Where should I hide this stone?… What will the title for today’s blog post be?… Etc.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s a way around it. Growing-up in the West makes you mental and our culture doesn’t really have the tools to cope with the situation and get around our egos. That being said, I think that staying somewhere for more than a day or two helps, because after a few days in San Diego that anxiousness and sense of duty to take pictures sort of fell away and I was able to just have fun hanging-out in a new place. My assumption is that if I stayed in a place like Joshua Tree for a week, the visit would follow that same progression and by the third day I’d be a good mental state to just soak it all in without any real concern of trying to actively capture any of it.

All of THAT being said, the real solution is to just not take pictures or write a blog or post to social media when I take another trip… but the chances of that happening or slim and none.

Driving East vs Driving West

And, here we are, driving from Bird Island, Minnesota, back to Akron, Ohio, via Oglesby, Illinois. When you drive west to the Pacific Ocean from northeast Ohio, things progressively get more interesting. On my path, things were familiar the entire way through Kentucky, Tennesee and Arkansas. While it wasn’t all Appalachia, it more or less resembled my home turf and the the landscapes that I was familiar with from my many trips to Waynesboro, Virginia.

It was once I drove into Texas, specifically southwestern Texas, when things changed drastically and a person like me who’s spent 99% of his life in the same environment goes “Whoa… look that that… what’s going on there… how is that even possible… this is fucking amazing… are you kidding me?!?” And it’s like that the entire way from Texas through New Mexico through Arizona and California and Nevada and Utah (especially Utah) and Colorado and Wyoming and South Dakota.

Then… you get to Minnesota, which is still sort of charming in its utterly vast nothingness, but then Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana and finally Ohio slowly bring myself back home, like waking-up from a wonderful dream, and back to reality.

It makes me wonder if anyone from Arizona or Colorado ever drove east, and upon arriving at the grand vista of nothingness in western Ohio thought to themselves, “My god… it’s so beautiful! I want to stay here forever!” Probably not.

Indiana Dunes National/State Park?

My final National Park on the way home would be the relatively new Indiana Dunes National Park, which lies in the northwest corner of Indiana, just east of Gary. My knowledge of the park was next to nothing and I didn’t do any research on it, so I have nobody to blame but myself for the experience. Nevertheless, it was a frustrating one that bordered on infuriating. To be fair, Route 80 south of Chicago was under construction and had multiple collisions on it, which led me to try to find a route around it all through local neighborhoods. That didn’t go well, and by the time I arrived at the park I was already in a salty mood.

The visitors center was easy to find, but it’s the Saturday before Memorial Day and I arrived around 1 PM, so the place is absolutely packed. My first task is to get my stamp(s) and souvenirs, then track down a park brochure. Rather than wait in line and talk to a ranger, I decide to handle my visit on my own via the brochure and my AllTrails app. The idea is to log a hike and take some pictures of the dunes for the blog, then try to get home at some sort of reasonable hour. It only takes a minute to find a hike, punch the location into the GPS and head-out.

After a couple of miles, I find a line of cars waiting to go through a gate and when I get to the end I flash my ID and National Parks interagency pass, I’m informed that this is Indiana Dunes STATE Park. When I ask, “Well, where’s the national park then?” I’m told that the national park is pretty much everything else around the state park and it costs $12 to get into the state park. At this point in the trip, what’s twelve fucking dollars? So I fork it over and drive into the park which turns-out to be a beach packed full of people cooking hamburgers, playing volleyball, etc. Great.

Now, I’m absolutely over the entire thing and just want to take care of business. The application of sunscreen occurs, the bag is strapped to my back and I’m off hiking along a beach wondering where the dunes are? The area is full of trails according to the app, so I change directions and head up to an observation deck thinking there must be a view of them up there. That’s not the case and the observation deck only gives me a view of the beach I just came from and some trails that lead off into wooded areas. As I continue along one of the trails, I find-out that they are entirely sand-based trails and hiking in sand isn’t a fun experience. This only lasts for about a quarter of a mile before I turn around and go back to my car. My obsessive nature forces me to look through the brochure again and refer to my maps app in an attempt to find-out where the dunes are so I can get a picture, but there’s nothing obvious. It all appears to be interwoven in residential neighborhoods.

Finally, the part of me that doesn’t like to travel says to me, “Fuck this place, it’s bullshit, let’s get out of here and go home.” And I follow that person’s advice.

The Home Stretch

The drive from Indiana Dunes STATE Park to Akron only takes about four and a half hours. Once I found my way back to Route 80, I was able to turn-on the cruise control, turn-off the GPS and simply drive because I knew exactly where I was and where I was going. Once I got past Sandusky, the drive was totally familiar to me because I’d driven that stretch of road countless times visiting my grandparents on Middle Bass Island. That sentiment just added to the overall melancholic mood I was in while driving the final road home after such a marathon of a trip.

The final stops were to wash my car, hit a liquor store and pick-up something to eat because I know my refrigerator is empty… let me rephrase that… I’m assuming and HOPING that my refrigerator is empty, and I don’t feel like making anything anyway. My choice is Alladin’s because, in case you weren’t aware of it, Lebanese food is my favorite. Once back at my place, I only unload my car, leaving the actual unpacking and dispersal of belongings to another day.

And, that’s that.

Postmortem

My friend Randy McFizzlebottom, who you may remember from the post regarding my visit to Bandalier National Monument, has been following my trip since we parted ways in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We’ve stayed in-touch and he’s told me he’s interested in conducting another interview with me once the trip is over. He says that the article he wrote about me after our first discussion was flushed down the toilet by his editor and never saw the light of day. Regardless, like me, he’s a bit of a completist and wants to write a follow-up article. If that happens, I’ll post some of the transcripts here.

In any case, if you’ve followed this blog, I appreciate you taking the time to read it. Writing and maintaining a blog isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s a ton of work and is only made harder by the timeline I gave myself to write each entry. So, if you’ve read any them, I sincerely appreciate it.

Until next time. Rock over London, Rock on Chicago: McDonald’s, I’m Loving It! Cheers.