I vividly remember vacations growing up with my family. We’d pile into the car and drive for hours or days to go someplace — Florida, or North Carolina, or Ontario — and having spent a weekend or a week we’d turn around and drive back. More than once we’d end up driving through West Virginia in the early hours of the morning trying to beat the traffic, with fog or rain obscuring the road and the fear of hitting a truck or a guardrail looming in my mind. At least it seemed that way to me at eight years old. We never did.

Those trips were ultimately about where we were going — Walt Disney World, or Hilton Head, or Niagara Falls. The road trip was mostly a way of getting there: the hotels along the way stopovers and the restaurants as much to break up the driving as anything else. In other words, the kind of road trip I’ve been doing for the past three weeks has kind of been new for me. I’ve been traveling through places, not to places, with the itinerary as much excuse as rationale. It’s been great.

I started on the Pacific Coast, visiting a friend in San Francisco and then a friend in Portland. In both cases I just hung out for a few days then ended up taking a road trip down the coast of their respective states over the weekend.

In California it was State Route 1, the iconic coastal highway. I had wanted to visit Hearst Castle, but it’s currently closed¹ so instead we just drove the coast, spending a night in Monterey² before heading past Big Sur and ending up down in Cambria. There was a storm coming in which was gracious enough to hold up until we drove back north, so we got some hiking done in Big Sur through many truly towering redwoods³ and the next day wandered around the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, an expansive coastal dune system known for being the site where Cecil B. Demille filmed and then buried the sets for The Ten Commandments.⁴

We had discovered an art installation at Paso Robles, Bruce Munro’s Light at Sensorio, so we made a point of stopping along the way. We arrived just before sunset, and it didn’t look like anything with the sun out, but as it got dark the field of fiberoptic flowers slowly started to assert themselves, filling a 15-acre space with 50,000 gently glowing spheres, all the colors of the rainbow. It was magical. I’ve been increasingly interested in art that’s situated outside of museums, large-scale works which envelop you, and this was almost pure delight.

I did a similar thing in Oregon, spending a couple days driving down the coast after crashing the first half of the week with a friend. The comparison with California was interesting. It may have just been luck, but while the drive in California was largely a gorgeous, sunny day finishing with one of the unbelievable sunsets over the Pacific.⁵ Oregon was mostly a windy, stormy overcast drive past stark rocks and dramatic tides. But I really like the storm-wracked coasts,⁶ so I’d be hard-pressed to say which I preferred. Both are wonderful.

After the coast we turned inland to spend a couple nights in wine country. I had wanted to see the Spruce Goose⁷ but the main attraction was a wine tour through the Willamette Valley. I had hired someone to drive my friend and I around the area — no fun drinking if you’ve got to quibble over who needs to be the designated driver beforehand — and spent a lazy, incongruously sun-drenched day trying loads of different varietals.⁸ I typically prefer beer and liquor, but give me a beautiful day, a stunning view, and a lovely drinking companion, and I’ll happily sip wine all day and wish I could have done the same thing the next.

After the Pacific Coast I flew to Salt Lake City, for no reason other than I had never been. It was an incredibly weird place. It wasn’t just the Mormons.⁹ I was staying on the north edge of downtown and walking around was a deeply unsettling experience. It’s the scale of the place. It is not a city that’s designed for pedestrians. The layout is a grid of roads the same way most of Manhattan is and scaled similarly,¹⁰ but whereas walking in Manhattan means a vibrant array of bodegas and restaurants and shops and the like, most of Salt Lake is taken up by buildings that fill the near entirety of the blocks they’re situated on.

So it doesn’t fall into the usual failing of urban sprawl; there are a surprising number of skyscrapers for a city where land is comparatively cheap. But each building is isolated unto itself. There’ll be a massive twenty story hotel with shops for guests and a lobby bar and restaurant. Then a massive apartment building. Then a massive office complex. Then another hotel. And sometimes you’d pass a corner restaurant or a convenience store. But there wasn’t any street life to talk about, and so unsurprisingly there really wasn’t anything which might have catered to it.

It reminded me oddly of the Las Vegas strip. The strip had the same architecture — gigantic lots with buildings taking up all the space, designed with the intention of making it as unpleasant as possible to walk next door. Las Vegas as least is trying to make that all feel fun and exciting, so as much as they’re trying to discourage you from leaving they’re also trying to entice you to come inside. Salt Lake feels like it was shaped by intense disinterest in its urban residents. I don’t think either one can hold a candle to some actual community-minded civic planning.

I toured Temple Square the day I arrived.¹¹ The Temple was closed as they’re installing earthquake abatement measures, but it’s always closed to nonbelievers. You can still visit the grounds (including the Tabernacle and the Assembly Hall) as well as the LDS Conference Center. It turns out the tours are entirely staffed by nineteen-year-old women on missions. This was a little uncomfortable for me; they were so aggressively pleasant¹² but clearly had a particularly sheltered upbringing¹³ and while I did have dozens of questions I really wanted to ask¹⁴ I resisted the urge.

The last day I was there, kind of burnt out by the city, I rented a car and drove out to Spiral Jetty, the earthworks sculpture by Robert Smithson. I’ve been reading about it since forever and it suddenly occurred to me I could visit it, so I went on the spur of the moment. It’s only a couple hours drive north. For the first four decades of its life it’s mostly been underwater, sometimes murkily visible, sometimes not, but the drought of the past decade has caused it to emerge more and more frequently. When I visited it was completely exposed with the edge of the lake more than a ten minute walk across the salt flats. And there’s something deeply powerful of not just the sculpture but the location, the remoteness of the thing and the drive through the landscape to get there, a half-hour along unpaved roads where eventually even your cell signal drops out until you reach the place. You have to work to see it, and you get there, and it’s moving the same way a pilgrimage is. I’m sure it’s not on everybody’s wavelength. It certainly was on mine.

For the last part of my trip I flew to Phoenix, met a friend, rented a car, and spent a week driving through the desert to Las Vegas. Las Vegas was still Las Vegas¹⁵ but I’ve never really been in the Southwest before¹⁶ nor had I really been in a desert before. I jumped in hard, visiting Sedona, the Grand Canyon, and Zion National Park.

We got into Phoenix early enough to see both the Desert Biological Garden and tour Talesin West on the drive out of town. Talesin West in particular was fascinating; I’m kind of obsessed with Frank Lloyd Wright — the Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art remains a favorite of mine — and we booked the last tour of the day, wandering through the house and the studio and the grounds over sunset. I have trouble pinning Frank Lloyd Wright down; the designs are undisputedly genius, but I’m increasingly dubious of it on practical grounds. Wright insisted on bespoke design, customized to fit the specific needs of each individual space. That’s all well and good if you’re designing a single house for a single rich family¹⁷ but we live in a world where we need to build skyscrapers and apartment blocks to house thousands of people. Frank Lloyd Wright is unquestionably an artist, but if there’s any branch of art that needs to be responsive to the society it exists in, surely that’s architecture. And Wright doesn’t really seem like they were interested in listening to anyone except themselves.

A little further out of town we stopped by Arcosanti for their tour, and the contrast was illuminating. Arcosanti is an experimental arcology, founded in 1970 by Paolo Soleri. It’s an attempt to create a self-sustaining community — think EPCOT imagined by artists, not capitalists — and it’s a weird mix of buildings inhabited by about 70 people, most artists of one type or another.¹⁸ The building were all built by the inhabitants out of local materials, concrete forms molded into arches and walls, and all the spaces are designed for multiple uses over the course of the day, so a community kitchen in the morning might become the snack bar for when tours are running over the afternoon and a common dining hall in the evenings. It’s an experiment to find new ways to organize life and work, and if they’ve fallen a little short of their goal¹⁹ they’re still trying to find a way forward and try new things.

After that my friend and I headed into what I’m thinking of as the Desert™, the real, serious desert of the Southwest United States, and I realized very quickly that everything I thought I knew about what the desert looks like comes from Saturday Morning Looney Tunes.²⁰ The flora of the desert just doesn’t remotely look like that. There are trees, for one, and not just scrubby mesquite or ironwoods but maples and willows and cottonwoods anywhere there’s even a little water. There’s even fir trees after a certain elevation, particularly in Zion where they’re perched in some of the most precarious spots, their roots slowly cracking open the rocks. Even where there isn’t enough water for that the deserts are filled with shrubs and agave and aloe and cacti.²¹ There’s a ton of plants, in other words. It’s not surprising some overworked background artists toiling for Warner Brothers left most of them out.

But what they got absolutely right were the rocks. The landscape is packed with those massive wind-swept rock formations, sheer and imposing and eroded into odd and improbable shapes, many massive boulders jammed at strange angles or looking like they’re on the verge of tumbling into the canyon at the slightest nudge. They look, in other words, like a cartoon. Sedona even has the correct technicolors, with the rocks a riotous shade of red-orange.

So I spent a lot of the last week hiking. I don’t hike. At least, I didn’t hike. But I managed to inadvertently plan a trip through some of the most spectacular natural scenery the United States has to offer, and there’s no real way to experience it except on foot. That’s where traveling with a friend really paid off; if I were alone I would have done a few hikes here and there, but having someone experienced around to scout the trails and make suggestions and track our progress was a huge boon.

I had booked a bunch of touristy stuff as well, all of which turned out to be great. In Sedona we did a stargazing tour²² and one of the iconic Pink Jeep tours,²³ and culminated in a sunrise balloon flight.²⁴ I stayed at the lodges in both Grand Canyon Village and Zion National Park. And I managed to book a two-day mule trip down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back.²⁵ But you want the hiking as well.

People talk about the beauty of the Southwest, but I never understood until I had been there.²⁶ It’s not really my scene — too hot, too remote — but it made me wish I was the sort of person who mountain bikes or free climbs. When we were in Zion we took advantage of the afternoon to hike the West Rim Trail up to a spot called Angels Landing. It’s a steep trail that culminates in a scramble over severely angled sandstone to an utterly amazing view over the canyon.

Neither I nor my friend did the scramble at the end; there are chains anchored into the rock to make it less foolhardy but it’s still a precarious route exposed to the wind and an unsurvivable fall if you make a misstep. But for all that, I think I could have done it. The weather was clear, the rocks were dry, and there was enough light to make it out and back. If you’re careful, take your time, and don’t get overconfident, it’s certainly doable.

I may never be confident enough in my skill to feel like it’s a good idea. If I ever go back, though, I’d like to be fit enough to march myself through the switchbacks to the base of that trail and at least consider inching myself up the rest of the way. And as someone who’d generally rather hike across a city park in the direction of a particularly good pastry shop, that’s saying a lot.

I’m currently in an airport lounge in Las Vegas. I spent the weekend here, meeting another friend and showing them around the Strip. I did some new things — Omega Mart²⁷ and Absinthe — and I got to revisit the Wicked Spoon Buffet²⁸ and Bouchon Bistro.

Vegas is basically back. Masks are currently mandatory everywhere indoors²⁹ but the shows are running and the restaurants are open and the gaming tables are packed per usual. I didn’t gamble and wore masks during the shows and felt appropriately distanced in the restaurants; I suppose I’ll quickly know if that was enough to avoid problems in the next few days.

I’m flying to London, the last actual travel I have planned before 2022. This is literally the first time I’m going somewhere without an onward destination. I’m crashing with a friend for a week or so; beyond that I’ve got nothing planned until 2022.

I’m trying not to feel like I’ve run out of road. My past month of travel with friends has been so amazing, such a relief after the lockdowns of early 2020, that it’s difficult to conceive of going back to isolation. But maybe that’s where we’re headed. I know I haven’t had the courage to book travel; I simply don’t have faith the world’s learned enough from last year to avoid slamming the borders shut this year.

But we’ll shortly know, one way or another. We’re in a better position than we were, with vaccines rolled out and treatments developed and a far better understanding of how the virus spreads. So this winter is likely to be better than the last. I don’t have plans for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s yet — invitations welcome — but I’m hunkered down in the UK and I expect I’ll be staying there.

One reason I went as all out as I did over the past month was the fear we would be back to lockdowns over the winter. I stocked up on happy memories: big open skies and elaborate dinners and time spent with friends. Here’s hoping we won’t need the surplus, come winter.

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Footnotes

¹ You’d have through because of COVID, but no, it was highway subsistence.

² At the utterly delightful Jabberwock Inn, an Alice in Wonderland-themed B&B.

³ You can see where the wildfires burned through some years ago. The redwoods are adapted for it — fires will scar them but typically don’t seriously hurt them — but they can clear out most of the other flora and fauna.

⁴ Sadly, the Dunes Center was closed so we couldn’t see the sets they’ve recovered or even hire a guide to see where the archeological dig is going on.

⁵ We literally pulled over to watch, it was so impossible to comprehend.

⁶ Not for nothing they reminded me of Ireland

⁷ Which I saw as part of a special Halloween after-hours event where the museum had actors in costume telling spooky stories. The one playing Howard Hughes was pretty fun, but the one I liked best was the Night Witch describing flying bombing missions over the German lines during WWII.

⁸ Pinot Noir is a regional specialty, so there was a lot of that.

⁹ Although a lot of it was the Mormons.

¹⁰ Although most of the streets are called things like “800 S” or “400 W” which I understand isn’t really much different than “42^nd Street” or “3^rd Avenue” but sure feels a lot more dehumanizing.

¹¹ The Mormon church has a large vested interest in demystifying their religion — partially for proselytizing, partially to try and reduce discrimination against members of the church — and so they run a number of free tours every half-hour for anyone who wants to show up.

¹² You could watch them running through the Dale Carnegie playbook on making people like you.

¹³ One was astonished to find out I hadn’t owned a car in New York City, and another one had never heard of Impressionism.

¹⁴ “Are you really sure the Church correctly understands the will of God regarding the role of women in the Church, especially given the ongoing nature of revelation?”

¹⁵ I only spent a couple days, but had a fancy dinner and got to visit Omega Mart.

¹⁶ I had crashed in Santa Fe for four days a couple years ago, but didn’t really leave the city.

¹⁷ Although Wright famously dismissed any concerns from their clients about utility or livability. Many of the designs leak to this day.

¹⁸ Although some of the rooms are rented out on AirBnB, if you’re looking for an amazing experience in that neck of the woods.

¹⁹ The original plan was to grow to 5,000 people

²⁰ We did see a wild roadrunner at the Botanical Garden

²¹ One of the really strange sights driving out of Phoenix was seeing dozens of massive saguaro lining the ridge of a hill the way you might have seen juniper trees do elsewhere.

²² Sedona is an International Dark Sky Community, so there are limits to how bright the lights are at night and, correspondingly, some fantastic stargazing.

²³ Ours was half hiking and half jeep ride over some of the bumpiest terrain I’ve ever driven over. Our guide was shocked and delighted we had opted for the hiking portion — apparently everyone else just wants to get strapped into the Jeep and run through a rock tumbler for four hours.

²⁴ This was expensive and ridiculous and utterly unforgettable. There’s really no sensation of movement. You’re just standing still as the world gets smaller and smaller beneath you. If I could have only done one thing on the entire trip, that was the one to do.

²⁵ These apparently book out 15 months in advance, and are popular enough to have a lottery for slots. I got incredibly lucky when I called back in May; there was a cancellation and a single slot was available.

Much as I don’t hike I don’t ride, so it was an awkward six hours down to the bottom and an only-slightly-less awkward five hours back up the following day. The path is narrow and you’re regularly inches from what can casually be a 1,000 meter drop. But you’re more firmly planted in the saddle than you feel, and while the mule might be disinterested in whether you safely make it home they’re smart and sure-footed and will not set foot anywhere they might slip or fall. You might have to accept the quiet terror of one inching forward at the edge of a cliff trying to reach a succulent bit of grass — I regularly did — but about three people die from falls in the Grand Canyon every year and not a single one of them has fallen off a mule in the history of the park.

²⁶ In a shocking twist, a travel blogger attests to the necessity of travel.

²⁷ Omega Mart is Meow Wolf’s Vegas outpost, and while it’s certainly worth checking out I think I kind of preferred the one in Santa Fe. This one issued you an employee card that you could scan at different stations to unlock different things, but it was crowded enough to mean there were often lines you’d have to wait through to get to the machines, and it ended up with a bit of the feel of an MMO where you’d see an endless stream of punters all being told they were the only ones who could save the world by scanning their card at some other machine somewhere.

Would the Grand Canyon be better with fetch quests? Does everything need to be gamified?

²⁸ Closed for dinner, but open for brunch.

²⁹ And compliance seems to be pretty good.