Location: Big Water, Utah 

Car Mileage: 214,768 

Trip Mileage: 4,477 

Back when I was still in Mississippi, my friend Danny asked what the highlight of my trip had been so far. At the time, my choice of highlights was among visiting friends in Nashville and Lexington, drinking Frostop Rootbeer, or jamming to Blink 182 and sipping energy drinks on the highway. It wasn’t lost on me that these were all things I could have been doing a few weeks ago while still employed. However, it occurred to me that it can be hard to pinpoint the highlights when you’re in them. (I am inadvertently paraphrasing Andy Bernard from The Office finale: I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve left them.)  

The past week I have been able to capture a few of these moments. One of my sister’s coworkers was telling me how much easier it is to put up with the corporate BS when you know what you’re working towards in your personal life. For him it was a cabin in Michigan. One of my frustrations with my life was the lack of clarity in what I was doing. When I was stressed with course work in college, my unhelpful tendency would be to do none of it, an absolute nasty habit when it’s finals week. While college might be over, the challenges just shifted from “How do I calculate depreciation of leased construction equipment?” (easy, just use Chegg) to “What’s my career path?”, “How long do I rent before I should just buy?”, and “Why is watching movies on my couch not helping me meet women in real life?” 

Life gets easier to manage when the questions shrink from “Where will I be in five years?” to “Where am I sleeping tonight?” I left San Antonio knowing I would hit five national parks: Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, and Petrified Forest. Though I didn’t plan out where I’d sleep. Every night I drove through the dark looking for a picnic area or a free campsite. The bright side? You wake up completely surprised by your surroundings. Night driving is where I have seen most of the wildlife, I just wish they weren’t always in the middle of the road. I had to slam the brakes for the likes of elk, javelina (hairy pigs), and a tribe of immovable donkeys. 

There is little to offer you in National Park reviews that haven’t been laid out by a seasoned pro online. Now that I have toured several, I feel they can be categorized into three groups: Museum, Explore, and Recreation. Carlsbad and Petrified Forest fall into the museum category. In these, you stick to the trail and don’t touch, plus they each have their focal object (i.e. Caverns and old petrified wood.) Guadalupe and Big Bend were much looser on the rules. God made it, go enjoy it. 

In Big Bend I did a 12.5 mile hike and I was constantly telling myself that I wasn’t in good enough shape for this (I wasn’t). At the end of all that my feet were ready to have a mutiny. There were some great views, and it was a visually entertaining exercise, but it wasn’t until I got to White Sands that I realized, “Oh, hiking isn’t fun.” 

White Sands created its own category as I was surprised to find it wasn’t like any other park I’d been to and was much closer to a family beach outing. I expected my White Sands visit to be a quick in and out. Partly because it looked like a giant sandbox with little potential, and also because I had a 9-hour drive ahead of me in order to reach Petrified Forest and Phoenix in time. I was surprised at just how much fun White Sands was. I got my play time in by sprinting up and down the sand dunes. I really wanted to try to do a front flip while running down the hills, but seeing as I can’t even do a flip off of a diving board I decided it might be a safer option to find a shady spot to read instead (an activity I am just as rusty at).

As I sat, I watched people from around the world enjoying family picnics, flying kites, shadowboxing (not sure what was going on there), and sledding down dunes. I didn’t want to leave. The joy in this place was palpable. As I finished my chapter, I was looking for a good reason to leave when an Asian man across the parking lot gave me one. “Sandstorm coming!” It wasn’t a life-altering gust of sand, but in the distance, I could tell that it posed a big enough threat to the open windows of my car. I enjoyed White Sands, but I don’t want to be hauling white sand all the way to Alaska. 

Two towns that left an impression were Terlingua, TX and Cloudcroft, NM. I’m not treating these as future hometowns, but they were dripping with character. Terlingua was half ghost town and half tourist location for Big Bend visitors. They haven’t bothered to add much architecture over the past 100 years, which makes it feel like you’re driving through the early 20^th century. Several hundred miles down the road, as a rest stop between Carlsbad and White Sands, sat Cloudcroft at 6,800’ elevation. Here I spent my first night since departure in a tent.

As I pulled into town there was still enough light to see the herds of elk and horses roaming around. I spent that night less concerned about bears and mountain lions (although I did sleep with a firm grip on my bear spray) and more concerned about getting trampled by startled horses. That was the worst night of sleep I have had, as every rustling leaf woke me up. It was also really cold due to the hillbilly shower (bottle of Dasani poured over my shivering body) right before crawling into my sleeping bag.  

I don’t remember what “highlight” I told Danny a couple weeks ago. The happiness that I couldn’t quite timestamp at that point has become easier to identify. I noticed my grin when I was watching the wild ponies in Cloudcroft, and I felt it again with my toes buried in the sand. Those moments, even when they cost a few tanks of gas to capture, are the ones I’m after.