The big adventure begins with a lot of work and anxiety. Early that morning, Mom and I kiss Dad, "Bye," and put him on a plane back to South Carolina. I am sure they are both exhausted from the long days of driving and sightseeing. For Mom, it is only a small dose of what is to come. We spend the rest of the morning last minute gear shopping. The movers arrive at my storage unit two hours early. We spend several hours getting that truck loaded and packing my car, La Niña, with the gear that will keep us safe, warm, fed, and entertained over the next month. La Niña's clutch has been acting funny and we have reservations at Breitenbush Hot Springs that we cannot miss. I decide we need to prepare ourselves for two days of relaxing and then returning to Bend to get the clutch repaired. Mom is not happy about this situation at all because, as it turns out, she has a major issue with backtracking. She wants to skip Breitenbush and just get the clutch repaired so we can get on the road without looking back. After a dinner of sushi and much convincing, Mom puts her faith in my words that there is NO WAY she can miss the opportunity to spend two days at Breitenbush. We had also earlier agreed that throughout this trip, we will not drive at night so we won't miss anything and so we will always be getting good nights' sleep.
So, here we are, leaving from Bend after dark, driving deeper and deeper into the dark, scary forest. I have taken for granted the fact that I am very comfortable in this environment and have previously been to where we are going. Mom on the other hand, is quietly looking out the window into the darkness, I later learned thinking to herself, "What is my daughter getting me into?" We finally arrive. We load up an old buggy with our necessities and walk with the guidance of our headlamps through a maze of small cottages until we find ours, A3. Our accommodations are primitive to my Mom's eye and plush to mine. We have beds, a
toilet and a sink. Plush. We unload the buggy and I insist on showing my Mom around. It is now midnight and Mom and I, with our headlamps, are walking through the "campus of the personal retreat center. Clouds have settled in, blanketing the stars and moon. It is very, very dark.
We walk along the paths that Mom cannot really see and I only know are there because of my trained nighttime vision and previous experience at this very special place. I show here where we will have meals and get fresh water in the lodge. We continue our journey through the trees to the hot spring pools. As we begin undressing to enter the 104F degree mineral water, it begins to rain. Mom whispers to me, "Aimee, it's raining." I reply, "Great!" I explain that there is no talking in this particular pool and she seems content with this, seeing as how she had barely spoken since we arrived. I think she was taking it all in and trying to remember exactly why she agreed to embark on this journey. We soak, enjoying the warmth of the healing waters, the sound of the nearby rushing river and the light sprinkle of rain. We both sleep deeply that night, in our little cottage listening to the rain and river through our open windows. The next morning, we awaken to the sound of the bell signaling breakfast. The food at Breitenbush is amazing; all organic, vegetarian cuisine prepared by creative chefs. It’s my favorite part of the Breitenbush experience. Because there is no way for you to understand what it’s like to be at Breitenbush unless you go there, I will simply say we spend the next two days eating gourmet food, soaking in hot springs, letting our fears go downstream with the river, and reading quietly in swings. Perfect peace and renewal. As all things must come to an end, we drag our renewed bodies, minds and spirits back to Bend to get La Niña’s clutch repaired. In the end, backtracking was painless.
We are finally off, saying farewell to Oregon and thank you for the experiences. We camp our first night in Maryhill State Park on the Columbia River, just inside the Washington border. After familiarizing ourselves with the campground, bathrooms and river, we set up Mom’s tent and create a cozy warm bed for resting her body. I enjoy every minute of teaching Mom how to set up a camp, prepare dinner, and make a fire by bowdrilling with sage. We sit up for a couple of hours enjoying the stars and conversation by the warm fire before crawling into our beds. It is a perfect night for a “first ever” camping experience. After waking, exercising and eating breakfast, we pack back up the car and drive on through Washington and into Idaho. Mom mentions how much work camping seems to be and wonders exactly why people choose to do it. I giggle.
We consult our handy dandy United States Campground Guide book and begin searching for our second campsite. We are playfully arguing about our individual interpretations of the directions. We come to agree that “hub” means “a center spot from which different directions fan outward” like the car’s “hub caps.” Even with this understanding, as the sun is setting and we are still driving around, we do not find the campground. So much for Mom’s confidence in this book I am swearing by. What Mom is able to find, however, is a plush (and this time, I mean “plush” by anyone’s definition) resort hotel in beautiful Coeur D’Alene. It is a marina/golf resort. Super fancy and surprisingly affordable. After our first night of eating camp food and sleeping on the ground, this place is better than any campground touted in the official guide as one of the best campgrounds in America. We enjoy a feast at a wonderful wine bar, sitting on the sidewalk of one of the cutest, cleanest little towns in Idaho before sleeping in luxuriously fluffy beds in a room with remote controlled curtains that cover huge windows overlooking the marina.
After a fulfilling breakfast delivered straight to our room, we load our clean bodies back in La Niña and begin driving into Montana. Ahhhhh, beautiful Montana. This day, we recognize we have a problem with keeping ourselves well nourished. This is the second day we realize
we need to eat only when our blood sugar has dropped low enough for our moods to become “pissy.” Alas, we make it to the plush (by my definition, not by Mom’s) campground recommended by our guidebook without hurting one another. I mean, this place even has laundry facilities and a cute lodge area with a TV, DVD movies, books and Internet access. For a campground, this is plush. Glacier Campground is located just outside the West entrance to Glacier National Park. Along the road to our campground are signs warning that we are entering Grizzly Country and reminding us of all the precautions to take so as not to attract bears. Even I am a little unnerved by these warning signs so I can only imagine how my Mom must be feeling. As I imagined, my Mom is pretty hard core and she handled the stresses of living in the wilderness with grace. I set up Mom’s tent as she begins preparing dinner. Mother Nature decides we aren’t clean enough so she is going to send us rain. We quickly throw on our rain gear and I begin putting up a large shelter over our picnic table and fire pit. I take
a great deal of pride in my shelter building skills and it takes me an embarrassing amount of time to get the tarp positioned in a way that it will be tight enough not to dump rain puddles on our heads when the wind blows. At this point, Mom is getting a little frustrated and speaking more and more frequently about how much work camping seems to be. Meanwhile, I am running around with a big fat smile on my face, cutting up pieces of cordage and moving La Niña closer to tie off this new cordage. I am loving every minute of setting up this campsite that will be our home for the next two nights. Finally, we eat dinner, get a nice raging fire going and settle into popping popcorn over the fire. After about fifteen minutes of shaking the little aluminum pan of corn over the fire, and after more debate as to whether or not camping is worth the effort, we begin to hear the sound of popping kernels and smell that comforting aroma of butter. My Mom said it would be nice to have some popcorn that night, so dog gone it, I was determined to have some popcorn that night. It was good. It rains most of the night and subsides by morning. We drive into Glacier National Park not knowing what to expect. My breath is taken away instantly and doesn’t come back for several days. We spend the entire day driving, stopping and sightseeing until we have covered the entire park navigable by vehicle. This place is magical. I’ll let the pictures explain.
We spend our second night at the Glacier Campground and head south toward Yellowstone. We spend the night in Bozeman, Montana where evidence of our healing time with Mother Nature begins revealing itself. We are giddy with the excitement of sleeping in a bed with a solid roof over our heads. Mom requests a room with a “nice view,” which cracks us up so much that we laugh all the way to the room and then to the swimming pool and hot tub. It is like Mom has reverted back to her childhood. We have so much fun playing like kids in the pool, then jumping into the hot tub, then back into the pool. That night is one of my favorite memories from the entire trip.
The next day, we are off to Yellow-stone National Park in Wyoming. We have not yet learned our lesson of how to properly nourish ourselves throughout the long days of driving. We have no lunch at all that day. We enjoy some sights before setting up camp amidst the Grizzly Country warning signs. It is colder here than we have yet experienced and we need tent stakes for my shelter so we drive from store to store in search of them. We buy Mom some more cold weather gear before giving up on the stakes and entering a beautiful lodge restaurant where we put our name on an hour-long wait list. Mom heads to the bathroom. I sit on a big leather couch in front of a huge fireplace and drool at the plate of fried Portobello mushrooms appetizer the people sitting beside me ordered. I decide we need food and I need to let go of this stress and anxiety I am carrying around trying to make everything perfect
for my Mom. I decide she is a grown woman and can take care of herself and I don’t need to try to control everything. Mom emerges from the bathroom, having shed her many, many layers of clothing. It turns out, she seems to also have decided she can take of herself and exclaims, “I’m going to get a drink from the bar, do you want one?” She settles into the big couch in front of the big fire and we order ourselves drinks and our very own fried Portobello mushrooms. As our blood sugar levels begin to even, we laugh and laugh and laugh at how we have been struggling this day. We enjoy Bison burgers for dinner and return to our little campsite, exhausted. This campsite is much more primitive than the plush Glacier Campground and both of us drift into uneasy sleep, hearing every sound out in nature wondering if it is a bear. Turns out, most of the sounds were geese.
We awaken and treat ourselves to a cleansing ceremony by Yellow-stone Lake. The sun is just beginning to warm the Earth. We pick a spot by the Lake and reflect on our eating habits and how they are affecting us. We recognize with which parts of the trip we are struggling the most and burn sage to cleanse our bodies and spirits so we can begin this new day with a commitment to letting the negative energy pass and to take better care of our physical selves. We spend the rest of the day eating snacks and exploring the mind-boggling geysers in the 30-mile diameter of land that was once a giant erupting volcano. We laughed a lot. Once again, I’ll let the pictures explain.
Our second night camping at Yellowstone is more comfortable. We enjoy the warmth of a big fire. We are more familiar with our surroundings, so the threat of Grizzly bears isn’t as burdening. My Mom, who once swore to me that she would not pee outdoors, successfully pees outdoors in the middle of the night, all by herself. Is it weird that I feel so proud for something as such? After discussing my pride of how hard-core my Mom has been proving herself to be and how much fun we have been having “roughing it,” we decide it is not necessary for us to continue camping. We agree to continue to see all the sights we have planned to see, while sleeping cozily in the fluffy soft hotel beds from here on out. My Mom’s relief is shared by my own.
We drive through the Grand Tetons into beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It is here where my exhaustion from driving begins to catch up with me. We decide to take a day to rest. We find a cute little motel with a big fancy pool and wet sauna to nap and rejuvenate ourselves with a swim and steam. We spend the evening checking out the town and dining at the outside tables of a rustic restaurant. I can tell that even though we’ve decided to sleep indoors from here on out, Mother Nature is working her magic on my mother. Neither of us could bring ourselves to want to eat indoors. The next morning, we visit the National Museum of Wildlife Art, as my Father urgently suggested. It was awe-inspiring to say the least. We do our laundry at a Laundromat before driving South into Utah.
After two days of driving, we finally arrive at Zion National Park in Southern Utah. I first learned about Zion when I lived in Flagstaff. My friends in Flag often took weekend trips to the beautiful Park for rock climbing and backpacking. I never made it to Zion when I lived in Arizona and have wanted to visit there since I first heard stories of its mysticism. The stories were all true. Zion is my kind of desert place with beautiful sandstone formations. Mom declared it her favorite thus far as well. She even walked barefoot on the soft sandstone! Oh yes, she did. The park is relatively small and Mom and I are both left wanting more when we surprisingly reach its exit sign within an hour of driving through it. It seems that Zion is an extremely popular place. The lodge is full and the hotels outside of the park are full. We have only covered 1/3 of the land we would be covering before arriving home, so we stop at a few lookout points, say hello to several desert bighorn sheep and say a loving “farewell until next time.”
We stop at the cutest little “nothing of a” town on the border of Utah and Arizona, Kanab. We enjoy a surprisingly good meal at a locally owned restaurant. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember the name of that restaurant, but if you are ever in the area, you can’t miss it. It has a sign that says, “Gourmet Food.” Who wouldn’t stop? After a good nights sleep, we are heading to the Grand Canyon, north rim. It is super windy and we spend a good amount of time ogling at the big crevasse in the Earth before continuing to Flagstaff. I am excited to show Mom around my first love in the Southwest. We enjoy a sushi dinner with my dear friend Keith. We spend the next day touring around my old stomping grounds and drive into Ojo Caliente, New Mexico.
The Ojo Caliente Hot Springs Resort is a place my sister found in 2005 when she visited me in Albuquerque. The healing mineral waters at Ojo Caliente are my favorite of anywhere. I find myself surprised and disappointed by the new management here. They have put TVs and DVD players in every cottage and the influx of tourists these “improved accommodations” have attracted are not respectful of the “whisper only” policy. The mineral waters are the only part of this resort that is the same as I remembered. Oh, and the food. The food at the Artesian restaurant in the resort is absolutely scrumptious. The food and wine here is our favorite part. I get a mediocre massage and Mom gets an hour-long gentle neck caress. Did I mention the food?
We gladly journey on to Albuquerque where I am ecstatic to introduce my Mom to my healer, friend, and counselor Rita. Mom finally receives a real massage, about which I am sure you will continue to hear her speak for years, and I get a much needed dose of Chakra work and spiritual renewal. It rains and rains and rains and rains. It rains more in that one night we spend in Albuquerque than I think it did in the entire two years I lived there. The cargo area of La Niña, where we have all of our equipment, clothes and food leaks. It is all wet. Ok, not all wet. But a lot of it is wet.
This is when we set our eyes on the road and our ears on the books-on-tape from Cracker Barrel and really start driving. Did I ever mention that Mom does not drive standard vehicles? Right, and so I have been doing all of the driving, while Mom works on her control issues in the passenger seat. We average 9 hours a day of driving over the next three days. We stop for swimming, sleeping and drying gear in hotels and one, short, glorious reunion with Mom’s sister Carol, niece Laurel, grand niece Mackenzie and nephew by marriage Darrel in Tennessee. “Maryville’s got that ball, yee-haw!”
It is still raining. It has been raining from New Mexico all the way to North Carolina. Mom is convinced we will have to sleep another night in a hotel. I am determined to sleep in my Mom’s house. Dad is planning on cooking us a gourmet meal as a welcome home gift and Mom is still convinced we are going to have to spend another night in a hotel. My determination wins. We arrive home around 10pm; too late for the gourmet welcome home meal. I will never forget the expressions of emotion on Mom’s and Dad’s faces when they see each other. I don’t think they have spent that much time apart since they were married. I don’t think Mom has ever experienced anything quite like what we did in those 22 days. Mom and I don’t even realize the impact this trip will have had on us. Over a bottle of wine, we relive every moment of the trip with Dad and our dear, dear friend Ronnie. Ronnie leaves, Dad goes to bed. Mom and I take a few moments to have a closing ceremony for our journey. We share our favorite memories, what we learned about ourselves and what we hope for one another in the future based on all that we have learned. It is beautiful.
It is dark and we have been driving most of the day. We are exhausted and giddy like three teenagers beginning an adventure into the great unknown. The morning welcomes us with overcast skies and strong winds misting a soft gentle rain. We go straight to an old inactive lighthouse and then to the beach, where we explore the bizarre and colorful life that inhabits tidal pools. We get back into the car, driving Westward to Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We see an amazing performance of The Music Man. The next stop is Crater Lake National Park. All that I can say about Crater Lake is that you must get there at some point in your life; simply breathtaking.
