On A Two Week Roadtrip
This is going to be a multipart effort designed to catalogue last year’s road trip. Also, I need to throw away the sack of brochures I have been keeping around for a year.
I have been reading a great deal of moral philosophy lately. Well, “a great deal” is like 4 pages a day because it’s HARD but that’s 4 more pages then almost all of my readers so it qualifies as “a great deal” if you ask me. My reading has been predominantly focused on Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein and how we derive or justify morality in an increasingly secular world. Luckily I haven’t had to read all of those people because that’s craziness. Instead I’m reading Metaphysics as a Guide To Morals. For most of my readers, stick with me because this essay isn’t actually about moral philosophy, at least not primarily. I promise to be just as entertaining as I typically am.
One of the main developments of moral philosophy was Kantian ethics (also called duty ethics and I just made you say “doody”) wherein there are two types of duties (types of doodies), perfect and imperfect. A perfect duty is one that everyone must follow. Kant believed you should never lie under any circumstances because once you decide it’s OK to lie in this one instance, the line becomes fuzzy and you can convince yourself to lie in lots of other circumstances, mostly to yourself when you say things like “Yeah it totally makes sense to put the house on the market immediately after a six month ordeal of getting a crazy successful play up and running”. I digress. An imperfect duty is something like giving to charity. Yeah you should do it but how much? How often? That’s pretty much up to you and Kant wasn’t going to bust into your home and fill out that Paypal form for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.
What does any of this have to do with a two week road trip? Nothing really except I needed an intro and I feel an imperfect duty (it’s clearly imperfect since it took 12 months to complete) to write about our travels as a way of cataloging our lives for the time 18 years from now when Harper is in therapy and needs to track her violent crime spree back to something and she can remember through my words about the time we spent fourteen days in a tiny trailer for no apparent reason whatsoever. It’s enough to make anyone homicidal.
Sunday, August 13th, 2017
Miles traveled: 349
We planned to get an early start and so we left at 11:40 AM. Plans are for work, random late starts are for vacations. We drove to Amarillo and stayed the night with my parents, the last time we’d see a non-camping shower and toilet for 10 days. In fictional literature and education, this is what’s called a harbinger. Typically harbingers are for bad things like when the Raven shows up on Poe’s doorstep. This is no different. It was nice to spend a night with my parents.
Monday, August 14th, 2017
Miles traveled: 461
We left at 9:20 AM which actually is early in the grand scheme of organizing a one year old and also knowing this is the last time in ten days you’ll be in a bed that wasn’t purchased at a camping store. We didn’t really have any clear plan other than to head towards Pagosa Springs. Not having a plan is the defining characteristic of the quintessential Western road trip you idealize in your head. Not having a plan with a one year old in a car seat is the defining characteristic of madness. Still, we drove and drove and ended up in Navajo State Park which is actually 35 miles past Pagosa Springs. We actually did have a plan and that was to make it to the mountains on day two so that the rest of the trip could be somewhat more leisurely. Mission Accomplished.
We arrived at Navajo right at sunset. The park is on a huge lake that spans the Colorado and New Mexico border. It’s very beautiful. We ended up staying in Navajo for 2 nights which was pretty much the pattern everywhere we went. We decided that it was more fun to do slightly fewer parks but for longer periods of time. We (the Royal We, where it’s defined by “Brett”) also thought packing up every piece of gear every morning and getting it back out every night sounded insane. We spent time exploring Navajo and just enjoying being somewhere that was cool in the morning and pleasant in the afternoon. There are some great trails at the park, none particularly long, and they are well suited for families like ours. The lake was created by the damming the San Juan River but at the beginning of the lake is the San Juan and the Piedra confluence which you can explore.
Navajo has some large campsites and we spent some time ogling the massive trailers that some people were hanging out in. At this point in the vacation, we were still in the honeymoon phase and while later, we would ogle these types of trailers with insane jealousy and plans of a coup, it was mostly just fun to see the varieties, from tents all the way up to trailers that were larger than my first three apartments combined.
I seem to recall some attempt to get milk or other necessary good on 8/15 where I drove 20 miles or so up some random road looking for a convenience store at 7 PM at night. I also recall total failure in this attempt. Luckily, there are no notes in the Bullet Journal to catalogue this failure.
On Wednesday morning, we packed everything up and headed for Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. I think based on today’s millennial attention span and my need for feedback and closure, I’ll break this retroactive travel journal into multiple posts. I can’t promise I’ll do one every day until it’s done but one needs goals. And plans.