LIFE: Mega-America Trek

LIFE: Mega-America Trek

Finishing up my late-night Saturday shift at the paper, and I've just written what might be one of the more surreal headlines of my life: "Llamas die in blaze."

…Anyway, that's neither here nor there. So anyway, in all my talking about the big move to New Zealand in October, leaving Oregon in September, quitting my job, et cetera and so forth, I've never mentioned anything about our mega-America trek! Road trip! For how can an American lad leave his motherland after nearly 35 years without saying farewell to the amber waves of green and so forth? Anyway, visions I had of using our 6-7 weeks between leaving Oregon and leaving America for a grand, sweeping trip from sea to shining sea have had to be scaled back some. For one thing, it's expensive when we'll be making no income till November at the earliest, and for another, have you tried driving thousands and thousands of miles with a toddler in the car?

So my thoughts of visiting New Orleans, old friends in Texas and Mississippi have been sadly abandoned. Instead, we're still taking a pretty decent trip at the end of September, from my parents' house in Northern California (where we'll decamp to after leaving Oregon) down to visit friends in Los Angeles, then we're going to take a leisurely drive through Southern Arizona and then New Mexico. We'll then go up through New Mexico and into Colorado, visiting some more friends in the Denver area, and then zip across the Rockies through arid Utah and Nevada home (maybe stopping in Wyoming too). It's still a pretty damned ambitious trip to take but I'm really hoping we can pull it off, hopefully without leaving Peter in a rest stop somewhere. We're still in the planning stages... Any suggestions for sights to see in Southern Arizona or New Mexico would be appreciated! We spent our honeymoon in the Sedona/Grand Canyon area, but I've never been further south and only once briefly passed through New Mexico.

There's nothing at all like the Southwest in New Zealand, of course, and there's something about the wide-open road and highways of America that I'll really miss. NZ is only about the size of Oregon, and is rarely more than 100 miles across at any one point. You can pretty much always see the ocean. Which is great, but at the same time, I might get to feeling claustrophobic sometimes. One of the beauties of America is that you can get in the car and just drive, from Portland to Kansas if you wished, or Anchorage to Orlando. It's a big old world out there, and I want us to feel the highway wind on our brows a bit before we trade it for another one.