Road Tripping<\/p>\n
We\u2019re on the road, me and the mizzus, one destination in Arizona to meet up with old friends in Sedona, the rest \u2026 well, like I said, it\u2019s a road trip, side trips welcome, kind of the way the mizzus and me fell in love, on the road, a backpacking trip that ended with premature snow in the Big Horns then morphed into a Mexico detour.. <\/p>\n
We stayed on the Columbia River Gorge last night next to an incredibly weathered Indian church and houses, a village, I guess, browned, tilted and barely standing, its own museum next to the Bonneville lock and dam. South and north were two fishing platforms where the tribe netted salmon before the dams destroyed their harvests, a skeletal reminder of a slow genocide most history books omit. Traveling the byways is an unfurling history lesson. Especially if you drive with an historian riding shotgun.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re running the east side of the Cascades, dodging snow, high plains drifting, cutting east across roads a mile high with no traffic or services for vast distances. You want to know what I think America is — Clue: it\u2019s not Trump, it\u2019s not politics, it\u2019s not the Japanese internment camps we passed in Tule Lake — it\u2019s this wilderness that stretches beyond anyone\u2019s view, this sea to sea purpled majesty, a continent that rolls and heaves and manages after centuries to remain wild and free. Yah, corny stuff. Until you hike it or drive it \u2026 or simply stand in awe of it.<\/p>\n
I love this country. Let me say it again. I love this insane country. People ask me why we don\u2019t visit Paris or Beijing. Why we don\u2019t travel the world. My answer is I want to see Death Valley. I want to go to the Everglades. I won\u2019t be happy til we\u2019ve gone to see the ancient bristlecone pine forests. I don\u2019t care so much to stand in line to see the Parthenon or the Louvre. Sure, they would be great, fabulous, swell. But \u2026 I\u2019d rather see the Appalachians in the fall. Big Sur anytime. Mt. Rainier again soon.<\/p>\n
You can have your cities, all of them. I have a love affair with America, the land. We\u2019re on a road trip to see what we haven\u2019t seen before and a few places worth returning to. It\u2019s a second honeymoon, a third, maybe a 25th. The mizzus is with me and I\u2019m in 7th heaven. Heaven, I hope, if I believed in fairy tales, will look a lot like this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Road Tripping We\u2019re on the road, me and the mizzus, one destination in Arizona to meet up with old friends in Sedona, the rest \u2026 well, like I said, it\u2019s a road trip, side trips welcome, kind of the way the mizzus and me fell in love, on the road, a backpacking trip that ended […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[2402,2403],"class_list":["post-12602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-leaving-the-south-end","tag-sedona-in-sight"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12603,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12602\/revisions\/12603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}