There are times in life when you know you need to get out of town, but you aren't sure where. It's these moments that I'm most grateful for the great American invention of Road Trips.
It was early August, 2014, when my wife and I decided that it was time to head west to lower elevations in a desperate attempt to escape the blistering Utah summer heat. This trip, however, would not be the meticulously planned trip we had grown so accustomed to. Instead, we would try a new strategy that was becoming more popular in the increasingly digital age – "winging it."
In a sharp contrast from our London trip, which required stacks of printed paper maps and itineraries, we now had usable tools like Google Maps that could be accessed anywhere that had an internet connection, with phones powerful enough to make that possible on-the-go.
The other, perhaps larger, aspect of our trip planning this time stemmed from the fact that my wife had always done all of the planning and was somewhat burned out from it, so I volunteered to make this one happen with as little input from her as possible (spoilers: she still did a lot of planning).
My plan? No plan.
Okay, so "no plan" is a bit of an exaggeration. We had the first leg of our trip roughly figured out – we were headed down to sunny San Diego to crash on our friend's couch for an indeterminate amount of time. From there, our friend/host had a plan to road trip into Mexico for a few days with us a couple of her other friends whom we had not yet met.
It's hard, if not impossible, to make out what's happening in this photo, but this is my attempt to get some urgent work done in the car while we rolled through some collision/fire related traffic along Interstate 15, just outside of Baker. What's you can't see in this photo is the look on my face as I simultaneously realize to very important facts:
- The chances of my making my deadline were growing ever scarcer
- Working on a laptop in a car is the single quickest way for me to get carsick
I didn't manage to take any photos of our arrival in San Diego – it was, essentially, just a short stopover on our way down to Baja. What I did manage to sort of capture was our friend's cat coming to greet us as we arrived, which is far more important that San Diego skylines.
Now it was just a matter of getting some sleep before we met up with our new compadres and attempted to cram five adults and a boat load of luggage into our friend's Nissan Altima.