CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
Summer travel conjures all sorts of dreams, ambitions, feelings and FOMOs. But all I needed for inspiration this year was my Mum's old postcards.
Before I was born, my Mum and Dad went on a grand, four-year tour of the US and Canada (often with cattle in a trailer behind their truck because my dear late Dad was, in fact Farmer Brown). And man, they really did it, criss-crossing the country and exploring its furthest fields and plains and reaches before heading back to Australia and making me. Goodbye freedom, Ma and Pa! My apologies.
My parents divorced when I was five and Mum and I moved to Sydney. I remember – well, as soon as my curiosity and memory really met – she had all these albums and postcards of their adventures. What entranced me more than anything were the highly saturated postcards of American national parks – they seemed light years away from our existence, a combination of the big, wide world and the hypercolor illusion of American TV. Those postcards, especially the ones of Yosemite National Park, literally meant the world to me.
Cut to 2020. It was the first summer of Covid, and the worst of recent times. Not just a global pandemic with no end in sight but that combined with the callousness of the Trump administration and the racial unrest following the murder of George Floyd. Everything was bad, everywhere: people were either at home in the fetal position or moving somewhere else entirely. My husband Brandon and I decided to do something in between: to rent an RV, still keep to ourselves, but get the hell out of Dodge.
It was the best thing we’ve ever done. For six weeks from August to October, we drove across the country – picking up our 28-foot ‘Four Winds’ beast in New Jersey and heading through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma (pretty sure there were swingers in our RV park), Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and finally Palm Springs. I ran InStyle from my phone and in the occasional Airbnb: one day I was doing an Instagram Live with Gwyneth Paltrow about some Botox-y thing, and I was so entranced by the wooden bears outside our window in Wyoming that I left her hanging before picking up. (I showed her the bears, she understood).
When you drive across the country, it calms you. And in the worst of times, you’re reminded that everything you see has seen more than you. Lasted longer than you will. Witnessed and weathered history that you’ll never know. It’s not as simple as how small you feel compared to the universe, it’s more granular, more textured. Staying the night in Monument Valley, winding through Zion, or just patting a horse at the base of the Grand Tetons made me feel just…fuller.
Also, I really love rocks. Stop laughing. I know that sounds very simple (minded?), but I like to think when you lie on one, they leach out what ails you. A giant sponge made of granite, sandstone, limestone – it doesn’t matter, just find a big ol’ sheet of rock in the sunshine and lay down on it. You’ll find a frequency, if you just pay attention for a minute. It makes it all better.
This spring, Brandon and I were wondering what to do with ourselves for the summer. We really jumped the shark last year, with our big wedding in Kauai and a European honeymoon so long (hey, I didn’t have a job) that it just became a trip. Anyway, all I could think about was the magic and adventure of my Mum’s postcards.
So, I’m writing this post from Yosemite National Park, where we’re staying for a week. I’m pretty sure God lives here. When you drive into the Yosemite Valley, you enter a tunnel. The second you exit the tunnel you are greeted by a view that would seem like fiction if you weren’t right there. The herculean El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Fall pouring into the valley on the right, and the otherworldly Half Dome keeping watch in the background as the shadows fall. It’s almost too much to take, all this mightiness in one place. You feel like you don’t deserve it.
Yosemite Valley, interestingly, is quite compact – you can ride a bike around the valley floor, and do any variation of hike, from docile to terrifying. You can sit in a meadow and look up at El Capitan, wondering how the hell anyone could possibly stare at it too long, let alone climb it. But there’s a road that leads out of the valley, toward Tioga Pass, and it’s one of the most extraordinary drives I’ve ever experienced. You can meander around the eastern part of the park for hours, each view more overwhelming than the last, right up to where, at the highest altitude, you can find ice in the middle of a heatwave. All you need to do is get in the car and have an adventure.
Which brings me to a random thought: You know in the summer when you look on Instagram and it seems like “everyone’s” in Italy? I understand the show-offishness of the posting because Capri, Sicily and the Amalfi Coast are beyond lovely, they really are, but when I see all those pictures, I don’t envy anyone. There are tons of folks who think that being invited on a rich person’s boat is #goals. And I’ve been fortunate to visit on a couple of big boats with some lovely, generous people. But, more broadly, do you really want to hang out with a crowd that buys enormous boats? Also, it always strikes me how small the monied social pond is in a European summer (or St. Barts in the winter), everybody mixing for weeks with the same people they’d see in New York, LA, Aspen or San Francisco (not to mention all the Euros Euroing with each other). I mean, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez have been floating around on that giant thing for months. I’m pretty sure they’re not wandering off with backpacks.
Anyway, that’s what we’re doing tomorrow. We’ll go on a docile hike, where I’ll either be mesmerized or complain, and will end in a meadow with a beer. I want to see and feel the earth on this giant, enigmatic, rock-strewn planet.
And send my Mum a postcard.
We have good adventures
As with most of your posts, I co-sign every word with every fiber of my being. Excuse me while I go find a rock on which to lay my body in need of a good leeching.